The Flaneur

by Keith Tester (Editor)

Timely and original, this collection of essays from the leading figures in their fields throws new and valuable light on the significance and future of flanerie. The Flaneur is the first book to develop the debate beyond Baudelaire and Benjamin, and to push it in unexpected and exciting directions.

Genres: Fiction, Walking, Urbanism, Essays, Historical

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Keith Tester has been Professor of Sociology at Hull since 2008, having previously been Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Portsmouth. In 2010-2011 he is also Professor of Sociology at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea; Visiting Professor at the Bauman Institute in the School of Sociology & Social Policy at the University of Leeds; an Honorary Member of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia (where he has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow); a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; and a Research Associate of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University College Dublin. He is also an Executive Committee member of the Histories of Violence web project at the University of Leeds.

Keith studied for his Ph.D at the University of Leeds, and the ‘book of the thesis’ – Animals and Society – was awarded the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for Best First Sole-Authored Book in 1992. Keith is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of Human Rights and Thesis Eleven.

Keith’s main research interest is in thinking sociologically about the entwinement of culture and morality. For example, thanks to contemporary media we know about suffering in other parts of the world, but what do we do about it? What does this knowledge mean to us? Do the culture industries predetermine what we might know and do? His work raises these kinds of questions through the heritage of critical theory and, especially, the social thought of Zygmunt Bauman. His interest in culture has also resulted in publications on film and art.

Reviews

[Mana Misaghi]

Read multiple chapters from this for my essay. The artist and the flâneur by Wolff was the most interesting.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://chopsueyngarod.wordpress.com/...

I was cramming a revision. It was about the flaneur, erm, err, erase, the palaboy. I enjoyed revising this one, I enjoyed the texts the blind reviewer recommended me to read. Keith Tester introduced the book he edited, The Flaneur: “Flanerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it’s actually a final resignation to it” (13). I was tempted to bike from Rhodas to Ruby, from Marymount to Bulusan. It did not rain—it’s been raining the past days—so I walked. I told Vince I will be walking, give me 20-30 minutes. He should get ready. I walked my way to the streets where I also bike to work, an easy difference. The languidness of walking, not thinking of attending classes.

[Lukia · Rating 4 out of 5]

a pretty good collection of articles in conversation with each other. be warned that the locus of criticism is walter benjamin’s definition and this doesn’t stray far from that topic. when i’m researching, it’s rare that i’ll read through everything—a testament to how great the scholars are here!

[Dusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given the recent academic obsession with the uses and abuses of space and place, not to mention the ongoing Arab Spring- and "Occupy"-style demonstrations, the flâneur as a figure of urban agency, protest and decadence seems primed for a major resurgence -- Hmm, wonders the graduate student. Have I just found the dissertation topic? -- and near as I can tell this obscure Routledge collection is the closest we have to a book-length "modern" interrogation of the theory and history of flâneurie.

As expected, the essays gloss the flâneur's legacy, with ample references to Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire and Benjamin, and it's true that Benjamin's catchy "botanizing the asphalt" line is cited, punned and twisted ad nauseum, but the collection reflects the surprisingly vast number of ways flâneurie can shed light upon both the 19th and 20th centuries. You'll find, for example, not only four intro-style essays that recapture the history of the flâneur from slightly different perspectives but also essays on flâneurie as play, modern restaurant culture as a vestige of flâneurie, and more. Of course, the book is nearly twenty years old, and the more traditional earlier essays fare better in terms of showing their age: Flâneurie is, it can be argued, timeless (or, at least, our perspective on Baudelaire's "Painter of Modern Life" hasn't changed much in two decades), but when one of the authors starts to write about flâneurie in the age of the video-cassette, well... I pine for a newer book that takes into account the internet, the smart phone, 9/11, and Barack Obama. The book requires a rewrite!