Between the "flânerie" and the ostracism: the subjective resignification of the city in Fabián Casas and Martín Gambarotta

Abstract

Since the pioneering studies of Walter Benjamin about to image the flâneur in the poetry of Baudelaire, the poetic subject’s experience and their intimate emotional reconstruction of the city constitute a significant index to approach the experience of modern life. In this article, we want to check what are the particularities that distinguish this experience in the recent Argentine poetry -specially in the books Punctum and Refrito, by Martín Gambarotta, and Horla City y otros, by Fabián Casas-, than during the 1990-2000 decades, insistently and using various options, the relationship subject-city. In these texts, it’s possible to read the continuity -relatively canonical- of the flâneur by peripheral margins of modernity -in the case of Casas- and the voluntary seclusion, as extreme withdrawal before the experience of the street wandering, perceived as intimidating in Gambarotta.