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 Foucault's writings on the 'aesthetics of
existence' as well as Judith Butler's 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 McEwan's Saturday Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold Teju Cole's
Open City Dionne Brand's What We All Long For and Robin Robertson's 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.
