Tag Archives: Walter Benjamin

Robinson in Chronostasis by Sam Jenks with Koji Tsukada and Dan Jackson

Posted on 08/06/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – June 2022 My mind settled on one turbulent year in my life in  which I moved home nine times. I wrote about a moment where, standing in a 19th floor council flat in Shepherds Bush, London, I … 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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‘The Lodger’ by Louisa Treger

Posted on 23/02/2015 by Bobby Seal

Ten minutes into the conversation I realise that the writer my MA supervisor is talking about is the same one I discovered for myself some months before, except she gives Walter Benjamin’s name the full Germanic pronunciation and I realise … 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 1: The City and Modernism

Posted on 17/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

(Cities were) more than accidental meeting places and crossing points. They were generative environments of the new arts, focal points of intellectual community, indeed of intellectual conflict and tension. (Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (ed), Modernism: A Guide to European … Continue reading →

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Website of the Month – July 2012 – London Fictions

Posted on 06/07/2012 by Bobby Seal

London Fictions is a website curated by BBC journalist, Andrew Whitehead.  Andrew is an adopted Londoner and is passionate about London fiction.  He aims, with this site, to share his excitement about his subject with others. London Fictions features many … 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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Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project

Posted on 17/02/2012 by Bobby Seal

In many ways The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s lament for the passing of the flâneur. For Benjamin, the flâneur’s disappearance functions as a symbol for the ravages of capitalism upon metropolitan life.  The changing urban environment was no longer conducive … Continue reading →

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