ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the figure of Franz Kafka’s dystopian flâneur as it appears in two of his novels, The Trial and The Castle. By tracing the figure of the flâneur in literary works by Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire before considering the world of Kafka’s fiction, several key continuities and caesuras appear. Aided also by Walter Benjamin’s reflections upon modernity in The Arcades Project and his essays on Kafka’s fiction, it becomes clear that Kafka takes up the tradition of flânerie so as to transform and invert it by bringing the flâneur indoors and casting the crowd as increasing hostile toward him.
