Flâneur/flâneuse memory: Memory traces of the stroller in 20th century modernist texts

In this study, the modernist literary texts of the 20th century—James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Huzur— are examined comparatively in the context of the relationship between the flâneur/flâneuse type and memory. The flâneur, which means a person who generates thoughts with the impressions of the environment he acquires while strolling, is an urban figure that emerged with modernity and a type that has made a ground in the literary world. It was initially considered a masculine concept, but later its female counterpart, the term flâneuse, was also included in the literature. Walter Benjamin, who examined the flâneur as one of the basic concepts of his philosophy of history, limited the realm and time of existence of this figure, whose class position he saw as uncertain, to 19th century Paris, ignoring its potential to appear in different places, times, social classes, and gender identities. However, the flâneur has continued to exist in various forms in the subsequent centuries. Especially, Ulysses, Huzur and Mrs. Dalloway, the three modernist cult texts of the 20th century in which the theme of memory comes to the fore, draw attention as a literary space where the the flâneur lives in different forms. Accordingly, these three modernist works belonging to three different nations are examined through the relationship of the flâneur and flâneuse type with individual, communicative and cultural memory. In this way, it is aimed to provide a holistic perspective on memory studies, to reveal the function of the flâneur/flâneuse in modernist literature, and to contribute to comparative literary studies and modernism studies. As a result, it is observed that these works presents the modernist flâneur and flâneuse of the 20th century to the reader as subjects who not only see, watch, think but also remember. It is understood that the introspective wanderings of the flâneurs and the flâneuse in these three modernist texts play an intermediary role in accessing the memory that tries to create continuity between the past and the present in the modern urban space, which is the stage of the conflict between tradition and innovation.