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In the article entitled The Flâneur and the Aesthetic Appropriation of Urban Culture in Mid-19th-century Paris, the author, Mary Gluck, discusses the term and attempts to disambiguate it. In her opinion, two distinct versions of the historical flâneur exist, the popular flâneur and the avant-garde one, and their relationships with urban culture are different. Regardless, the author still considers them interconnected and continuous, highlighting the heroic nature of both.
According to Gluck, the popular flâneur is a public figure associated with a certain set of clothes and street roaming. The former consisted of a black frock coat and a top hat, which represented separation from the past and had a new meaning compared to bourgeois society wearing the same outfit. Flâneurs questioned modern life and its ability to produce heroic acts, although the inquiring existed in the field of popular culture rather than philosophy. The author suggests that they embodied heroism, and Balzac was arguably the quintessential example of the phenomenon. The popular flâneur lived in an age when authors attempted to accurately reflect the routine for future generations, criticizing works of the past for being narrow-minded. However, challenging the classics did not merely expose their inadequacy but also modernitys inability to produce new cultural traditions. The author believes that the flâneurs existence addressed those anxieties by making urban lifes heterogeneity transparent and legible through internalization. He was indistinguishable from others and not visible compared to the rest of social groups. In a way, the flâneurs outward anonymity reflected modern life.
The archetype had its false counterparts, including proletarians, tourists, and strolling family men. What made flâneur special, as the author claims, is that he caused other identities to become clear-cut and had access to urban culture as a whole, which granted him a privileged position. It was achievable by being an urban observer who focused on details and provided common occurrences with meaning. The article argues that the flâneurs power and insight came from imagination, likening him to a reader perusing the book, which is a metaphor for an urban scene. Simultaneously, the flâneur had to be a writer, which necessitated certain visual representations. All of them revealed him as a divine figure that reflected the goal of portraying the periods manners. However, the physiologies and aspirations of the 1840s were unsustainable, which was made clear with the revolution, and the popular flâneur became irrelevant.
The avant-garde flâneur appeared in the late 1850s, and his role was to resist the scientific notion of modernity. The author emphasizes that the newly established figure was a poet more interested in the text than the city itself. He was also heroic but could not extract meaning from everyday occurrences and the urban landscape; the avant-garde flâneur was an aesthetic iteration of the previous one with distinct features. First of all, the flâneur was no longer a type but an individual who employs various disguises, from a child to a dandy. Unlike the popular counterpart whose heroism was from within, the avant-garde flâneur was shaped by the outside, which allowed for subjectivity and more intense experience. The author compares him to the original creator possessing radical creativity, whose modernity is an aesthetic text created through dismantling the empirical world. The avant-garde flâneurs city was not a mystery but a site of beauty, mirroring urban life surfaces. The author concludes that, unlike the popular flâneur, the avant-garde one was cosmopolitan who could exist in a city other than Paris, which highlighted his liberated nature.
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