Modern Heroics The Flâneur in Adolfo Bioy Casares’s El sueño de los héroes

• Published in: Circulation and the City p. 240
• Main Author: AMANDA HOLMES
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: MQUP 21.02.2010
• Subjects: Agricultural management; Agricultural workers; Agriculture; Attention; Behavioral sciences; Biological sciences; Biomes; Carnivals; Cities; Cognitive processes; Cognitive psychology; Community identity; Cowboys; Destiny; Determinism; Ecology; Ecosystems; Entertainment; Etiology; Fatalism; Fate; Games; Gauchos; Grasslands; Group identity; Heroism; Human behavior; Human geography; Labyrinths; Leisure studies; Mazes; Metaphysics; Metropolitan areas; Pampas; Performing arts events; Philosophy; Political geography; Psychology; Puzzles; Recreation; Social psychology; Social sciences; Traveling shows; Urban environment; Urban identity; Urban space; Urban studies; Variety shows; Visual fixation
• ISBN: 9780773536647; 0773536647

Theflâneurof Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin – the idle urban walker of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian modernity, the male observer whose gaze deciphers the multiple impressions of the city – has been reconceived by Elisabeth Wilson as “invisible,” indeed “impotent.” In an influential work, Janet Wolff (1985) has contrasted the supposed power and visibility of thisflâneurto the invisibility of the unrecognized female urban dweller, the “invisibleflaneuse,” dwelling amidst the shadows and labyrinths of the city. For Wilson, however, the maleflâneurhimself exists within the Benjaminian labyrinth of the city, subject to an attenuation of his masculine power: “The