by Jon Lackman | 25 May 2007 | Modern
In the January 2007 Modern Language Review, Martina Lauster argues that Walter “Benjamin’s idea of the flaneur is not only of limited value for an understanding of the nineteenth-century urban experience, but can be seen positively to hamper it. This detrimental effect results from Benjamin’s dogmatic application of a high-modernist, aesthetic concept of self-loss, derived from a (flawed) reading of Baudelaire and Poe, to the interpretation of earlier, journalistic sources conceptualizing the flaneur.” In her conclusion, she writes: “streets are definitely not turned into interiors by the social observers of the 1830s and 1840s. Although the flaneur is portrayed as someone who has abandoned his private space, this does not mean that exteriors are experienced as ‘familiar’ instead.” There was more of “turning inside out, i.e. a defamiliarization, of private, internal spaces, rather than a turning outside in, i.e. familiarization, of public, external space.”
