The wanderer and the flâneur : Christopher Brennan as modernist

In The Politics of Modernism Raymond Williams observed that "Determining the process which fixed the moment of Modernism is a matter, as so often, of identifying the machinery of selective tradition". In particular, Williams objected to poststructuralist accounts of modernism which, with a view to their own legitimacy, hypostatised a version of the avant-garde. Against this Williams stressed the diversity of modernist writing: "What we have really to investigate is not some single position of language in the avant-garde or language in Modernism. On the contrary, we need to identify a range of distinct and in many cases actually opposed formations, as these have materialised in language." With Williams' concerns in mind, I intend to resubmit Brennan's credentials as a modernist by shifting the discussion away from questions of style (for example, the "problem" that Brennan didn't move beyond his late romantic mannerisms in the way that, say, W. B. Yeats did) towards an analysis of the dialectic of modernity and antiquity in Poems 1913. Framed by Walter Benjamin's analysis of the Baudelairean flaneur, and by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's reading of the Odyssey, my focus shall be the interrelated tropes of city and Wanderer.