This essay deals with the fictional use of the shipwreck as a metaphor in eighteenth-century works, such as in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, as well as in contemporary novels, such as Thomas Bernhard's Der Untergeher (The Shipwrecked), as a pathway to address the transformations of Enlightenment thought into what Zygmunt Bauman has called 'liquid modernity'. It considers the links between Skepticism and tragic thinking, and connects these ideas with insightful and decisive formulations by Walter Benjamin, in his work on Baudelaire's poetry and especially in his Arcades project. Finally, the essay discusses the concept of "arcades" an excellent metaphor to approach literature in our time, particularly those novels that can be named "fictions of disquiet".
literature; arcades; fiction; disquiet; liquid modernity; Walter Benjamin