Introduction

Tester, Keith

doi:10.4324/9780203420713_chapter_1

Cited by 32 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Comparing this mode of walking to that of the ‘city flaneur’, or a ‘stroller’ or ‘saunterer’ that roams the streets in modern cities, gives rise to several interesting points on walking in rural areas. A literary archetype that arose in nineteenth-century France, a flaneur is someone able to engage with the spectacle of industrialised, leisurely life while still being detached to it (De Certeau, 2011; Frisby, 2014; Tester, 1994). While we were driven by a flaneur’s sense of curiosity and desire for discovery, we could not lose ourselves in a crowd and become part of the wider landscape as a flaneur often intends to do.…”

Section: Walking To Discovermentioning

confidence: 99%

A Walk Along the River Betwa

Singh

Joshi

2023

Urbanisation

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The Bundelkhand region has long been in the news for its lack of development, political tussles and water insecurity. By embarking on a riverwalk in Bundelkhand, where we followed the Betwa River on foot for 130 kilometres, we were able to engage with a range of communities and ecosystems and better grasp both the problems and opportunities in the region. The mode of walking was essential to our methodology, as it allowed us to stop, listen and absorb all the details that make rural life what it is. We explored places, peoples, textures, smells and landscapes relatively unknown to us and our urban existence, and reflected on ways in which booming urban centres are dependent on rural areas that provide them with everything from food to sand. The riverwalk provided the foundation for our subsequent research and analysis on water governance in Bundelkhand.

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Section: Walking To Discovermentioning

confidence: 99%

A Walk Along the River Betwa

Singh

Joshi

2023

Urbanisation

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“…Undoubtedly, the figure of the flâneur is itself a versatile and elusive concept, which may be what makes it so fascinating: because it does not allow itself to be trapped in a formula or in a single definition. The word has been used often in common language as well as in academics to describe personalities and understand phenomena that might be quite different from each other (Nuvolati, 2006; Tester, 1994). The cultural debates and literary inspirations that this figure has given rise to, primarily among the Surrealists and the Situationists, led to a definition of flânerie (Sadler, 1999) that is elitist and “transgressive,” in a sense.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flaneuring the buyosphere: A comparative historical analysis of shopping environments and phantasmagorias

Castigliano

2022

Journal of Consumer Culture

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This paper proposes a comparative historical analysis of shopping environments, focusing on the aesthetic experience they offer to the consumer and underscoring their nature as phantasmagorias. At a time when digital disruption, exacerbated by the recent pandemic, has dramatically changed social habits and the cityscape, this research aims to investigate the impact of technological and social transformations on the buyosphere and the practice of shopping. The approach's original perspective looks at the close correlation between the flâneur and the consumer, examining how retail spaces in the modern metropolis have developed. The shopping experience is shown as a social ritual with complex facets, where the urban walker and the cityscape have gradually transformed, giving symbolic meaning to architectural forms and human identities. The findings of this study call for considering the opportunities and threats of the present scenario. The shift to the virtual realm has created new forms of phantasmagoria, such as the immersive experience in the brand's universe combined with omnichannel strategies. At the same time, the “retail apocalypse” and the reduction of spaces for wandering may risk limiting social encounters, the freedom of movement, and the individual's ability to interpret urban reality, elements that once defined the practice of flânerie.

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“…What’s more, it is precisely because their encounter is so brief and anonymous that the “dull” and “mortal” druggist can afterwards be transformed into an “immortal druggist,”“unconscious minister of celestial pleasures” (38). De Quincey preserves the man’s anonymity by consciously suppressing “any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and creature, that first brought me acquainted with the celestial drug” (38); the druggist can therefore never seem human and ordinary, recalling Keith Tester’s description of the Benjaminian flâneur as a “seeker after mystery from banality” (14). De Quincey’s inability to find the shop again – intentional, one might well suspect – functions similarly.…”

Section: : Opium‐eater Flâneurmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peripatetic in the City: De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium‐Eater and the Birth of the Flâneur

Stanback

2013

Literature Compass

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This article focuses on the distinctive modes of urban spectatorship Thomas De Quincey adopts in his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). In keeping with De Quincey's tendency to pastoralize his childhood, Part I of Confessions presents a young man who initially walks and reads London as if it were a village, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to register the cityscape. In these passages, which correspond to his first, 1802-1803 residence in London, De Quincey embodies a recognizably Wordsworthian subjectivity and a recognizably peripatetic perspective. Through a careful reconstruction of his younger self as an urban peripatetic, De Quincey reveals the insufficiency of a rural subjectivity to modernity and the metropolis, and examining Confessions in these terms provides new insight into De Quincey's richly ambivalent relationship with Wordsworth and The Prelude. When De Quincey depicts his second (1804) stay in London in Part II of Confessions, he depicts a younger self now able to digest -and, one might say, to artistically and sympathetically exploit -the city. In this mode, De Quincey may be properly understood as the earliest flâneur; with characteristic prescience, moreover, De Quincey anticipates the limits of flânerie that Charles Baudelaire would eventually come to register and that Walter Benjamin later described and theorized. In depicting the self as urban peripatetic and (proto-)flâneur, De Quincey's Confessions marks a key moment in the history of modern urban spectatorship and practices of walking, constituting a provocative early attempt at negotiating the relationships between the eye and the crowd, the body and the pavement, the self and the modern metropolis.

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Introduction

Cited by 32 publications

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A Walk Along the River Betwa

A Walk Along the River Betwa

Flaneuring the buyosphere: A comparative historical analysis of shopping environments and phantasmagorias

Peripatetic in the City: De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium‐Eater and the Birth of the Flâneur

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