Boom: The New York City flaneur in postwar American literature and art

Boom: The New York City Flaneur in Postwar American Literature and Art examines the expansionary period from 1945 to 1965 in Manhattan and the work of Willem de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, James Baldwin and Andy Warhol. The dissertation focuses on how these writers and artists responded to the city's seemingly limitless and bewildering capacity for growth at this time, and how the disorienting effects of the postwar boom challenged the individual's ability to navigate city space. The theories of Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin are key to this project; in particular, Benjamin's elaboration of Baudelairean flanerie resonates in the postwar cultural context and helps me to advance new readings of these artists based on their imaginative urban subjectivity. The contradictory landscape of chaos and prosperity during the building boom demanded something like the flaneur's improvisation in order to convert the stimuli of crowds, traffic, and commodities into aesthetic material. The model of flanerie thus foregrounds a certain post-ironic sincerity, mobility, openness, and a consequent vulnerability as central affective strategies for these individuals. Their work emphasizes the risk of self-exposure sustained by the flaneur's body in urban space and the ways in which sexuality, racial identity, and aural, tactile or visual perception express material differences within and against the backdrop of the boom city. The paradoxical combination of irreverence and intentionality articulated by these individuals undermines any easy critical distinction between the modern and postmodern, and necessitates a productive urban materialism that reflects the postwar flaneur's implicit contemporaneity.