![]() ![]() This weighty, but uncompleted, study used Baudelaire’s flâneur as a starting point for an exploration of the impact of modern city life upon the human psyche. ![]() ![]() In the twentieth-century Walter Benjamin returned to the concept of the flâneur in his seminal work, The Arcades Project. The city’s modernity is most particularly defined for him by the activities of the flâneur observer, whose aim is to derive ‘l’éternel du transitoire’ (‘the eternal from the transitory’) and to see the ‘ poétique dans l’historique’ (‘the poetic in the historic’).Ĭhristopher Butler, ‘Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900 – 1916’ Indeed, Christopher Butler suggests the flâneur is trying to achieve a form of transcendence: The flâneur’s method and the meaning of his activities were bound together, one with the other. Baudelaire’s flâneur, an aesthete and dandy, wandered the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris looking at and listening to the kaleidoscopic manifestations of the life of a modern city. The concept of the flâneur, the casual wanderer, observer and reporter of street-life in the modern city, was first explored, at length, in the writings of Baudelaire. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |