Precarious Flanerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

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Even though the literary trope of the flaneur has been proclaimed ‘dead’ on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flanerie takes a belated ‘ethical turn’ in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as well as Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flanerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of flanerie 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 Flanerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the flanerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.