She reflects on a time that she bought a piece of china and how it marked a memory for her in Italy. Items throughout one’s home help record experiences and define a person. This all vanishes once a person leaves their home and joins the masses on the streets. Woolf takes in the sights and sounds of London winter, falling leaves, and palely lit streets. She imagines the life of an office worker, thumbing through papers and answering correspondences. Baudelaire, Charles, and Jonathan Mayne. The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1964. Lauren Elkin, A Tribute to Female Flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets (Guardian, 2016) https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/29/female-flaneur-women-reclaim-streets In Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting”, the reader follows Woolf through a winter’s walk through London under the false pretense to buy a new pencil. During her journey through the streets of London, she is made aware of a number of strangers. The nature of her walk is altered by these strangers she encounters. Street Haunting comes to profound conclusions about the fluidity of individuality when interacting with other people. Woolf is enabled by the presence of others to subvert her individuality. Instead of reflecting directly onto herself, she uses the people she interacts with as a proxy for her own feelings and opinions. In doing so, Woolf empathizes with the people while engaging in a cold deconstruction of her surroundings, making the …show more content… I liked the third essay “Craftmanship” about as much; I just looove essays about writing, and deconstructing language and art.

The essay is also notable for its exploration of the relationship between the inner world of the individual and the outer world of the city. Woolf suggests that the physical environment can have a profound impact on the inner lives of individuals, and that the city can serve as a source of inspiration and creative energy for writers and artists.

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Reading as a diary entry, Street Haunting: A London Adventure includes imaginative observations and vivid reflections on city life. Woolf is widely known as one of the most influential modernist writers of the 20th century, and this classic essay offers a glimpse into the innerworkings of her brilliant mind. are so empty and furnished rather with light and shadow than with chairs and tables that one does not think of people, here where so many people have lived.” Kew Gardens, the second essay, is similar, except it takes place in July at a crowded park. One has the impression of Virginia Woolf perched on a park bench, observing flowers, animals, and people passing by, inventing motivations for each and copying down their dialogue with embellishment.

Sam Wiseman, Ecology, Identity and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the City in Woolf, Contradictory Woolf, ed. D. Ryan, Stella Bolaki (Liverpool University Press: 2012) Flâneur 2010., edited by Ian Buchanan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www-proquest-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/encyclopedias-reference-works/flâneur/docview/2137953454/se-2?accountid=14553. Yet she also allows one possible escape, perhaps predictable for an author and essayist: "But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets."Or is the end something rather different? The flâneur – a position in literary history hitherto reserved for men – describes a city-wanderer taken to the streets in search of inspiration. Encountering the shadow of a person who, it transpires, “is ourselves,” and asking the unanswered question “am I here, or am I there?” Woolf constructs an incorporeal, extra-temporal flâneuse who makes not merely a double-journey, but a triple: through space, time and the self. Woolf also speaks of a juxtaposition with the inhabitants of the city and its appearance. Speaking of an experience in Mantua, Italy, Woolf refers to the ‘violent’ arguments she witnessed and being ‘fleeced’ when purchasing a china bowl, which is constantly balanced against the calm and serenity of the setting. The china bowl acts in the same way as the pencil for Woolf, being symbolic of one’s experience and invoking memory. There is a consistent sensory element to these objects that Woolf introduces to us, as though these objects are alive themselves. In his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, established his definition of the flâneur, a figure that continues to capture the imagination of writers and artists more than a century later. Literally but imperfectly translated as “stroller” or “idler,” the flâneur is the quintessential observer, the outsider whose meandering path skims along, but does not directly intersect, with the paths of those that surround him or her. In Baudelaire’s eye, the flâneur was inextricably tied with the artist and the poet—the ability to return to one’s home and fashion something immortal out of these passing glimpses of modern city life.

Today, we’ve highlighted a few works in the library’s collection, both historical and contemporary that explore this lesser-known image of the flâneur in literature. Why not be transported somewhere new today? This collection is a perfect starting place for the reader who knows she ought to read Woolf but has shied away in awe of Woolf's reputation as "brilliant but difficult." Okay, okay, "A Room of One's Own" is also a great place to start, but that's not the revolutionary stream of consciousness, poetic, haunting, Modernist fiction that she's celebrated for. These stories are. And they are short. And perfect. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure - mysterious, unknown, useless as it is - is enough.” The next story, Lappin and Lapinova, may be the most traditional/accessible of the collection, but it's also the most subversive. A newlywed has a difficult time adjusting to life as a wife - until she invents a fantasy world for the couple to inhabit. This is a distinctly feminist story with layers of depth, and yet it is also universal and understandable without analysis. It's currently one of my favorite short stories in this or any other collection. Street Haunting: A London Adventure” is an essay written by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1927. In this essay, Woolf explores the theme of urban solitude and the subjective experience of wandering through the streets of London.The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.” –Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863 That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.”