![]() 'In observing Paris, the flaneur is looking at nothing other than the current expression of modernity. Although specific to a Parisian time and place, the flaneur is used as a figure to illuminate issues of city life irrespective of time and place. Tester points to the ambiguity that surrounds the historical specificity of the flaneur. This is borne out by a collection of essays on the figure published in 1994, edited by Keith Tester. (1) Schivelbusch's is not the only valediction to the flaneur, but, as often as the flaneur may be pronounced dead, he (or she) returns in a different guise. With the coming of the railway age, the flaneur could be no more. The railway passenger can usefully be read as a reinvention of the flaneur, as the works explore the potential of the (literary) imagination within technologically driven historical processes and the rationalizing networks of modernity.Ĭoncluding his study of how the railway industrialized the experience of space and time in the nineteenth century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch turns to the figure of the flaneur, arguing that the latter's retreat into the arcades represented an alienation from the speed of the modern world. Informed by Wolfgang Schivelbusch's history of the railway journey and Michel de Certeau's essay 'Naval et carceral' ('Railway Navigation and Incarceration'), this article examines the protagonist as railway passenger in works by Wolfgang Koeppen and Sten Nadolny, as well as by (ex-)GDR writers such as Wolfgang Hilbig, among others. Rather against expectation, this remains the case after 1945. ![]() Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, literature employed the railway network to investigate the experience of modernity. The Passenger as Flaneur? Railway Networks in German-Language Fiction since 1945 by Simon Ward
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