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Strolling Along with Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Flâneur and Thinking of Art Encounters in the Museum

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Abstract

This paper inquires into the notion of encounter, as part of a larger study on the art encounter by adult viewers in museums. More specifically it opens a common path for thinking in a session on the flâneur. Whether in an art gallery or in an urban space what does it mean “to encounter”? This conceptual paper has a specific focus on primary literature on the flâneur by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, The Arcades project. (R. Tiedemann, Ed., H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999a; The return of the flaneur. In M. Jennings, H. Eiland, & G. Smith (Eds.), R. E. Livingstone (Trans.), Selected writings II, 1927–1934 (pp. 263–268). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999b; Arendt 1968) not to define what an encounter “is” but to use Benjamin’s ideas on the flaneurial and see how productive they are for researchers who need to think the relational, materialist and embodied, walking experiences in/as part of their inquiry.

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Berard, MF. (2018). Strolling Along with Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Flâneur and Thinking of Art Encounters in the Museum. In: Lasczik Cutcher, A., Irwin, R. (eds) The Flâneur and Education Research. Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72838-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72838-4_4

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