ABSTRACT
The flneur, strolling the streets of nineteenth-century Paris with cool but curious eye, is a stock character in the documentary genre of the Tableaux de Paris which flourished in the 1830s and 1840s. The figure of the flneur first appears in Benjamin's writing in 1929 in a review of Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin entitled Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs'. Constituted intertextually from Baudelaire's essays and poetry, from Poe's fiction and Balzac's, from Dickens's letters about his own creative practice, from Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, and from documentary and historical writings about Paris, Benjamin's flneur is at once an observed historical phenomenon, a type among the inhabitants of nineteenth-century Paris, the representation of a way of experiencing metropolitan life, a literary motif, and an image of the commodity in its relation to the crowd. The equation of seeing with knowing and its implications are not directly addressed by Benjamin, and the precariousness of flneur's stance is defined in socio-historical terms.
