‘Un homme marche dans la ville’: Parisian Flânerie and Jewish Cosmopolitanism in Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder

This article examines how the narrator of Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder recalls the figures of the Parisian flâneur and the cosmopolitan Jew, thus complicating the novel's aesthetics by reworking the privileged apparatus of French and European cultural traditions that have long eschewed acknowledging Jewishness as a constitutive element. Dora Bruder may thus be read as an attempt to emphasize the significance of Jewishness to European literature in the late twentieth century. As a man walking in the city, the narrator reveals key tensions in the novel's aesthetics, while also demonstrating that the figures he embodies may be reconciled.