Name: Flâneuse
ISBN: 9783641214180

Lauren Elkin

Die Flâneuse - Virginia Woolf in London ist eine von ihnen, Jean Rhys in Paris, Holly Golightly und Patti Smith in New York. Sie alle erobern sich selbstbewusst Städte, Menschen und Gedanken. Sie sind neugierig, klug und unabhängig, reisen, wohin sie wollen und genießen die Freiheit der Großstadt. Die Autorin und Essayistin Lauren Elkin folgt den Spuren außergewöhnlicher flanierender Frauen, indem sie selbst durch das heutige Paris, New York, London, Venedig und Tokyo spaziert. Sie lässt sich treiben durch Städte, Literatur, Kunst und Geschichte und zeigt in ihrer Geschichte des weiblichen Flânierens wie berauschend es sein kann, sich eine Stadt zu erobern, was lange nur Männern vorbehalten war.

Frauen erobern die Stadt - in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venedig und London

Flâneuse

Cassandra Tang

That was the definition of freedom. Not just the time, and not just the transit: being able to do that in an environment that felt created for people, not machines, shaped and sustained by some kind of belief in having nice places for people to be, together, in public. 

I am always looking for ghosts on the boulevards. So many people have passed through Paris; did they leave any residue? 

We want to make choices, and have some agency in getting lost, getting found. We want to challenge the city, and decipher it, and flourish within its parameters. Anruf we should confront the Minotaur, we want to be able to get back out again.

I think people are made of the places not only where they've been raised, but that they've loved; I think environments inhabit us. By understanding people you understand places better, by understanding places you understand people better. 

I was just someone who happened to have moved countries. Displaced, dislocated, I wanted to be re-placed, re-located. 

Environments inhabit us. These places that we take into ourselves and make part of us, so that we are made of all the places we've loved, or of all the places where we've changes. We pick up bits and pieces from each of them, and hold them all in ourselves. 

An exhilarating, gender-bending walk through the lives of women who are enlivened by cities A flâneuse is, in Lauren Elkin’s words, “a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting,” Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1960s New York. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between singular women and their cities as a way to map her own life—a journey that begins in New York and takes us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo, and London—including the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing, nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the journalist Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film women’s sometimes liberating, sometimes fraught relationship to the metropolis.

Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

Beautifully written, though veers into the academic.  

The New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis. Called “deliciously spiky and seditious” by The Guardian, Flâneuse will inspire you to light out for the great cities yourself.

Liz Prinz

jiaqi kang

Really fascinating and inspiring, but the Tokyo chapter is perfunctory at best and orientalist at worst. Whereas Elkin writes of the other cities with clear passion and adoration, it seems like she is unable to make any effort to find a single female Japanese author, artist, or filmmaker who roamed the streets of Tokyo? Really? Sofia Coppola, who merely uses Tokyo as the strange, foreign backdrop against which her self-absorbed white characters "discover themselves" and does nothing to humanise the city and its inhabitants... Really? A tiny section at the end saying "but oh, at the end I grew to like it." Really? I guess I have to thank Elkin's editor for making her put that in.

Kristen Thomas

Karolina Klermon-Williams

Hannah Swithinbank

Martin Ackerfors

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis. Called “deliciously spiky and seditious” by The Guardian, Flâneuse will inspire you to light out for the great cities yourself.

Flâneuse Frauen erobern die Stadt - in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venedig und London

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