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 as conditio 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 McEwans Saturday, Siri Hustvedts The Blindfold, Teju Coles Open City, Dionne Brands What We All Long For and Robin Robertsons The 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,