In the spring of 2009, after jumping through what I'd considered to be a load of administrative hoops (oh, how I was naïve in those days before moving to France) I got a Harvard student id and took my first and only class at the little brick school down the street. In French 170: The City, I met Emily, the only other brass-rat bearer braving the depths of Harvard upper-level French literature that term. (Let's not get ahead of ourselves, she wasn't actually a brass-rat bearer until the very end of term, as she was only in her sophomore year, though somehow she'd managed to leap from an basic grammar course the term before to this while also mastering mechanical engineering and Japanese... MIT kids.) Anyway, Emily and I actually braved an entire term of French literature "discussion" with the Harvard crowd and bonded together through film sessions, a certain Harvard Yard festival, and our débuts into the world of flâneurs. Yes, if there's one thing we took from Prof. Conley's class, besides the fact that Harvard housemasters get to have pretty sweet houses even if their dogs are a little smelly, it's the word flâneur. According to wikipedia,
The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it".Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.
Now if that just doesn't scream Harvard literature class, I don't know what concept does. Nor do I particularly care to learn. Regardless, our class, which followed the evolution of the city of Paris over the past three centuries through the introduction of new technologies as reflected in literature through the years, grabbed on tight to this term as soon as we hit Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and never let go.
It only seemed appropriate therefore that we should seize the opportunity, albeit over a year later, to try our hand at the flâneur card together in The City itself. Emily was passing through on her way home from a vacation in Morocco this summer, so we wandered- or flâné- our way from the Pasteur down to Montparnasse and over to a nearby café I've enjoyed for a coffee with one of her MIT-Cambridge exchange friends. It was really nice to see a familiar face (even one who may have been equally guilty as myself of having forgotten her brass rat that day). It made me laugh over how far we'd come from that little semi-basement lecture room where we'd once sat passing around pictures of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their buddies sitting in their own café in The City.
It only seemed appropriate therefore that we should seize the opportunity, albeit over a year later, to try our hand at the flâneur card together in The City itself. Emily was passing through on her way home from a vacation in Morocco this summer, so we wandered- or flâné- our way from the Pasteur down to Montparnasse and over to a nearby café I've enjoyed for a coffee with one of her MIT-Cambridge exchange friends. It was really nice to see a familiar face (even one who may have been equally guilty as myself of having forgotten her brass rat that day). It made me laugh over how far we'd come from that little semi-basement lecture room where we'd once sat passing around pictures of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their buddies sitting in their own café in The City.
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