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The Flaneur in the Parlor: Poe's “Philosophy of Furniture”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Kevin J. Hayes
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Extract

In one of the brief reflections Walter Benjamin composed as part of his Arcades Project, he personified the mid-19th-century domestic interior and made it and the flaneur onfidantes: “The space winks at the flaneur: What do you think may have gone on here?” (418–19). Benjamin typically filtered much of his thought through the figure of the flaneur, a recognizable urban type that emerged during the middle third of the 19th century, one who deliberately strolled the city streets and arcades and attempted to discern the meanings of what he observed. In the fullest scholarly treatment of the subject, Anke Gleber argued that the act of walking formed an essential part of the flaneur's observational process. Discussing such works as E. T. A. Hoffman's “The Cousin's Corner-Window,” however, Gleber did acknowledge a “paradoxical variant,” the stationary flaneur (13).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 103 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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References

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