Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction () von Eva Ries

The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.

Even though the literary trope of the flâneur has been proclaimed dead on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flânerie takes a belated ethical turn in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucaults writings on the aesthetics of existence as well as Judith Butlers notion of precariousness asconditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flânerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwansSaturday, Siri HustvedtsThe Blindfold, Teju ColesOpen City, Dionne BrandsWhat We All Long For and Robin RobertsonsThe Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of flânerie and its textual representation produces ethical norms while at the same time propagating the value of difference by means of disrupting societal norms of sameness.Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the flânerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.

Eva Ries, University of Augsburg, Germany,