Tag Archives: Flaneur

The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker by Merlin Coverley

Posted on 14/12/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – December 2022 For such a seemingly innocuous activity, and one which is commonly conducted with the participant largely oblivious to its operation, the act of walking has aquired a surprising degree of cultural significance. This is a … Continue reading →

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 12

Posted on 04/04/2020 by Bobby Seal

I also took a digital approach to letting the river guide the composition, through a process called sonification. In the same way we might visually represent a set of data in a graph or diagram, sonification represents data through sound. … Continue reading →

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Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin

Posted on 07/10/2016 by Bobby Seal

The flâneuse does exist, whenever we have deviated from the paths laid out for us, lighting out for our own territories. Lauren Elkin is well-qualified to write this book, not only has she lived in Paris, London, New York, Tokyo … Continue reading →

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T.S. Eliot and the Flâneur

Posted on 25/09/2016 by Bobby Seal

  Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …   Tom Eliot was not a flâneur, or at … Continue reading →

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The City, Modernism and the Flâneuse

Posted on 20/10/2015 by Bobby Seal

  The passing of the historical figure paved the way for the resurrection of the flâneur as a methodological persona, adopted in order to pursue the exploration of the city. Stripped to its basic characteristics and used as a modus … Continue reading →

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Dorothy Richardson’s ‘The Tunnel’: Feminism and Flânerie in Bloomsbury

Posted on 07/02/2014 by Bobby Seal

  The idea of the flâneur was born in Paris and was first referred to by Baudelaire.  However, London writers have long used the device of the casual wanderer of the capital’s streets, the loiterer, the observer, as a means … Continue reading →

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Baudelaire, Benjamin and the Birth of the Flâneur

Posted on 14/11/2013 by Bobby Seal

  On voit un chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tête, Butant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poète, Et, sans prendre souci des mouchards, ses sujets, Epanche tout son coeur en glorieux projets. Charles Baudelaire: ‘Le Vin de Chiffonniers’ … Continue reading →

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From Streetwalker to Street Walker: The Rise of the Flâneuse

Posted on 24/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

In fact and in fantasy, London had become a contested terrain: new commercial spaces and journalist practices, expanding networks of female philanthropy, and a range of public spectacles . . . enabled workingmen and women of many classes to challenge … Continue reading →

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Woolf at the Door 2: Mrs Dalloway’s Inner Flâneur

Posted on 19/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

  In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Peter Walsh is the most obvious flâneur character; he is able to wander the streets of London with an abandon even the patrician Clarissa Dalloway cannot manage. In an encounter which in its imagery … Continue reading →

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Flânerie Seen Through a Lens: Light, Movement and Film

Posted on 10/05/2012 by Bobby Seal

I am fascinated by how the creative process of film-making links with the practice of the flâneur, feminism and early modernist fiction. The modern(ist) metropolis and the institution of cinema came into being at about the same time.  Their juxtaposition … Continue reading →

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