Georges Perec: Parisian topographies of the flâneur

Abstract

In this article, Perec’s sociology of everyday life is viewed through the figure of the flâneur, typical of the 19th-century Parisian literary imagination. How can the evolution of the flâneur - from the “botanist of the asphalt” to Baudelaire’s and Poe’s man of the crowds - shed light on the multiple figures of the Perecquian flâneur? This is what we will study by analyzing the figures of the motionless flâneur in Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu Parisien, and the eternally moving flâneur in Un homme qui dort.