Building in 1900: An Agoraphobic Tale

Abstract

If Gorriti’s prototypical protagonist—the contemplative wanderer situated in, and brought into existence by, “lost space”—is the ultimate figure of postcolonial nostalgia, the flâneur—the urban onlooker, who speechlessly, sometimes mindlessly, roams the streets for hours on end—is a figure par excellence for approaching fin-de-siècle modernity, in Latin America and elsewhere. Guided by virtue of mere nearness rather than of a preconceived plan, he or she is the ultimate consumer: of history, faces, objects, symbols, and metaphors.