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“Autumn Song” and “Spleen”: Baudelaire

Jennifer Radden

in The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva

This chapter discusses two poems by Charles Baudelaire, “Autumn Song” and “Spleen.” A French poet of the Romantic era, Baudelaire lived between 1821 and 1867. His short life was troubled and erratic, ... More

This chapter discusses two poems by Charles Baudelaire, “Autumn Song” and “Spleen.” A French poet of the Romantic era, Baudelaire lived between 1821 and 1867. His short life was troubled and erratic, and in his lifetime he published only one volume of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). He was troubled, moody, rebellious, and given to religious mysticism. His life was marked by Bohemian excesses, illness, and despondent and despairing mood states such as conveyed in the two hauntingly sad poems reproduced here.Less

Baudelaire's Impure Transfers: Allegory, Translation, Prostitution, Correspondence

Jonathan Arac

in Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel

The life of Charles Baudelaire was not committed to remaking the world except in poetry, yet his experience was deeply marked by the violent political energies of nineteenth-century France. In ... More

The life of Charles Baudelaire was not committed to remaking the world except in poetry, yet his experience was deeply marked by the violent political energies of nineteenth-century France. In addition to Baudelaire's life, he has been through different circumstances that offered a vivid emblem of his messy history. In addition, the prostitute has a further place in Baudelaire's poetry. The prostitute not only violates bourgeois decency and criticizes its hypocrisy by taking it to an unacknowledged logical extreme, but she also images the poet. Moreover, his short poems that respond to two possibilities are included here for discussion.Less

Monstre: Monstrous Fluidity

Maaheen Ahmed

in Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics

This chapter begins by drawing out the similarities between Baudelairian Romanticism—especially the Baudelairian monster, ennui—and the protagonists and aesthetics of Enki Bilal’s Monstretetralogy. ... More

This chapter begins by drawing out the similarities between Baudelairian Romanticism—especially the Baudelairian monster, ennui—and the protagonists and aesthetics of Enki Bilal’s Monstretetralogy. The ambiguity of the monster is likened to the relativization of good and evil discernible in Baudelaire's works. In addition to discussing the problematization of memory, the chapter also highlights connections between monstrous spaces and its monstrous inhabitants. A discussion of the amorphousness of monstrosity is followed by an examination of the roles of specularity and rebelliousness. The chapter ends with a brief reflection on how Monstreand fluid monsters reflect on modern and contemporary history. Comparisons are also made between Baudelaire's modern ennui and Bilal's postmodern monster, both of which reflect upon a broader cultural change and experience of everyday life.Less

Mood and Trope in the Lyric

John Brenkman

in Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect

Lyric poetry plumbs the link between mood and trope, that is, feeling and language, affect and expression. Paul de Man exemplifies the linguistic turn in literary studies, especially in his readings ... More

Lyric poetry plumbs the link between mood and trope, that is, feeling and language, affect and expression. Paul de Man exemplifies the linguistic turn in literary studies, especially in his readings of Rousseau and Baudelaire. The binary logical impasse of interpretation to which his insights inevitably lead (“aporia”) is countered in this chapter by the triadic mood–understanding–discourse. In poetic discourse, it is argued, trope provokes interpretation and interpretation discloses mood. The affective labyrinth of Baudelaire’s poetry and its duality of spleen and ideal occasion an attempt to give methodological consistency to the Heideggerian triad. Two problematics come to the fore, the question of subjectivity in the poetic triad mood–I–trope and the question of pathos and poetic form, the relation of the poet’s suffering and creativity. Another angle on mood and trope, as well as pathos and form, is found in the poetry of Li-Young Lee, for whom exile, family, and the past century’s “diary of fires” create layers of memory and dream, imagination and witness. Via Lee and Baudelaire, the question of the lyric comes into focus anew, reviving the dialectical approaches of Hegel and Nietzsche to the “self” in poetic creation.Less

Angela Carter’s objets trouvés in translation: from Baudelaire to Black Venus

Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère

in The Arts of Angela Carter: A Cabinet of Curiosities

Angela Carter experimented with translation across languages, genres and media throughout her life, and this informed her literary practice as well as her view of intellectual development as stemming ... More

Angela Carter experimented with translation across languages, genres and media throughout her life, and this informed her literary practice as well as her view of intellectual development as stemming from ‘new readings of old texts’. This chapter focuses on translation-related activities that stimulated Carter’s imagination, critical reflection, and creativity through the example of Baudelaire’s continuing presence in her life and work. From adolescence onward she was drawn to the French poet as a verbal magician, provocative dandy figure and forerunner of surrealism, quoting from Les Fleurs du Mal and rendering short prose texts from Le Spleen de Paris in English, but also critiquing the sexual politics of aestheticism and the cruel aphorisms of Mon Coeur mis à nu. This would percolate in her fiction, especially in the 1980 tale of ‘Black Venus’, which revisits the Jeanne Duval poems from a female perspective and assesses the poet’s legacy in an ambivalent gesture of appropriation, homage, emulation and derision. In this piece Carter muses on her life-long fascination for Baudelaire with her characteristic mix of self-irony, mockery, erudition and tenderness as she punningly responded to her love affair with the French poète maudit as venereal disease.Less

Listening to the Glazier’s Cry

Aimée Boutin

in City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris

This chapter draws on a network of discourses including the picturesque and flâneur-writing, panoramic literature on the Cris, and reflections on populist song, in order to show how different writers ... More

This chapter draws on a network of discourses including the picturesque and flâneur-writing, panoramic literature on the Cris, and reflections on populist song, in order to show how different writers harmonized the glazier's cry into poetic prose. It compares Arsène Houssaye's “La Chanson du vitrier” and Charles Baudelaire's “Le Mauvais Vitrier”. It shows how Houssaye's transcriptions of the glazier's cry and his use of the cry as refrain relate to efforts by musicians such as Mainzer and Kastner to document the cry for posterity. Houssaye harmonizes the cry to exploit its pathos and, in tandem with Nerval, Gautier, or Dupont, he seeks to achieve an authenticity through the transposition of song. In contrast, Baudelaire espouses dissonance in “Le Mauvais vitrier” and evokes the sinister and demonic effects of strident noise.Less

Translating Baudelaire: L’esprit Décadent and the Early Writings

Peter Jeffreys

in Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy's Imaginary Portraits

This chapter examines the influence of Charles Baudelaire on C. P. Cavafy's earliest writings, including essays, fictional narratives, and prose poems. It first considers Cavafy's prose ... More

This chapter examines the influence of Charles Baudelaire on C. P. Cavafy's earliest writings, including essays, fictional narratives, and prose poems. It first considers Cavafy's prose compositions—both expository and fictional—that function as an important index of his particular treatment of fin de siècle decadent tropes. It then discusses the impact of Edgar Allan Poe's aesthetic—refracted through Baudelaire—on Cavafy's evolving views on beauty and poetry. It also explains why Cavafy abandoned a career as a journalist critic and translator, turning his attention instead to poetry, and how Jean Moréas affected Cavafy's oeuvre. In addition, the chapter explores the flâneur in Cavafy's prose poems before concluding with a reading of Cavafy's gothic short story “In Broad Daylight”.Less

The Flâneur in Undue Influence (1998)

Peta Mayer

in Misreading Anita Brookner: Aestheticism, Intertextuality and the Queer Nineteenth Century

This chapter takes protagonist Claire Pitt’s speculative imagination, walking and misreading to read Undue Influence through the figure of the flâneur. Tracing the walking journeys undertaken by ... More

This chapter takes protagonist Claire Pitt’s speculative imagination, walking and misreading to read Undue Influence through the figure of the flâneur. Tracing the walking journeys undertaken by Claire Pitt and Martin Gibson, it presents a literal and literary map of the novel. It argues against Michel de Certeau’s assertion that maps constitute procedures for forgetting by demonstrating how Brookner’s women’s walking texts have been largely unrecognised. Drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s theories of Romantic imagination and walking, Harold Bloom’s narrative of intertextual influence and the rhetorical figure of peripeteia (reversal), this chapter recasts the relationship between Claire and Martin as the relationship between ephebe and precursor poet. In staging the performance of the flâneur, it rereads Undue Influence through the ‘revisionary ratios’ of Bloom’s narrative of influence—clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades. It argues against the heterocentric presumption of Brookner’s reception in which personal and romantic failure is the dominant narrative to tell about the novel. By freighting emphasis on women’s creativity, imagination, artistry and subversion and finding new ways to read intersubjective relationships, this chapter underscores value and industry of the woman writer and women’s writing.Less

“Deeds of Music Made Visible”: Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the Birth of the Modern

Simon Shaw-Miller

in Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage

This chapter examines composer Richard Wagner's music and ideas at the time of Charles Baudelaire's definition of modernity, and discusses Wagner's argument that each separate art form tends to ... More

This chapter examines composer Richard Wagner's music and ideas at the time of Charles Baudelaire's definition of modernity, and discusses Wagner's argument that each separate art form tends to extend itself to its limits, which it cannot pass without losing itself in incomprehension. It also considers Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk and Baudelaire's opinion about the need to recognize that here was an art which truly threatened the long-affirmed supremacy of poetry and which can turn poetry into a form of protomusic.Less

The Forms of the Perverse

Catherine Toal

in The Entrapments of Form

This chapter proposes that the transfer of literary influence achieved by Baudelaire’s recognition and misinterpretation of Poe’s “perverse” (the latter a widespread emergent American fictional ... More

This chapter proposes that the transfer of literary influence achieved by Baudelaire’s recognition and misinterpretation of Poe’s “perverse” (the latter a widespread emergent American fictional motif) contributes to the revision, within French literature, of the Sadean tableau of torture. This revision culminates in Lautréamont’s presentation of poetic rhetoric as a camouflage for murder. Arguing that the literary perverse obfuscates violence, the chapter draws on concepts of cruelty deployed in reading these works to show their relationship to the demands of context: in American literature, the pressures exerted by the burden of genocide; in French prose poetry, the claims of a repressed libertine-aristocratic prerogative. Walter Benjamin’s contention, in 1940, that Gaston Bachelard’s celebration of the kinds of violence represented in Lautréamont’s Maldoror amounted to a defense of “Hitlerism,” sums up the theme of this investigation: the relationship between literary form and historical projects of annihilation.Less

Marcel Broodthaers, An Artist in Quotation Marks

Patrick Greaney

in Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art

This chapter deals with Marcel Broodthaers and his role as the traditional artist in contrast to Debord’s revolutionary perspective. It begins with an account of Broodthaers’ artistic works and ... More

This chapter deals with Marcel Broodthaers and his role as the traditional artist in contrast to Debord’s revolutionary perspective. It begins with an account of Broodthaers’ artistic works and endeavors, and his poetry which is reflective of Charles Baudelaire’s, along with an examination of the sonnet “Beauty” (La Beauté). It also states that Broodthaers’ primary concern is the market; and according to him, the goal of art and critique is commercial, along with the objective of stimulating a critical attitude towards the public presentation of art. The chapter also considers Broodthaers’ examination of the material features of conceptual art, such as handwriting, typewriting, and figures.Less

Pictorialist Poetics: Transpositioning Word and Image

Peter Jeffreys

in Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy's Imaginary Portraits

This chapter examines the pictorial dimensions of C. P. Cavafy's poetry and how the Parnassian proto-decadent lineage of his pictorialism relates to the “transposition d'art” salon critiques of ... More

This chapter examines the pictorial dimensions of C. P. Cavafy's poetry and how the Parnassian proto-decadent lineage of his pictorialism relates to the “transposition d'art” salon critiques of Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and J.-K. Huysmans. Cavafy evolved as an adherent of postromantic Parnassianism to full-blown literary decadence, a transformation that owed much to the lingering influence of the French poets associated with the Parnassian movement. The chapter considers how the transposition d'art tradition found its way into many of Cavafy's poems and manifested itself as a full-fledged pictorial poetics. It also undertakes intertextual readings of poems and paintings that highlight Cavafy's affinity with the plastic arts. Finally, it looks at some examples of pictorial art directly inspired by Cavafy's poems.Less

Yang Lian and the Flâneur in Exile

Jacob Edmond

in A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature

This chapter develops an alternative to the entrapping oscillation between sameness and difference that bedevils contemporary approaches to comparative literature. It does so by exploring the ... More

This chapter develops an alternative to the entrapping oscillation between sameness and difference that bedevils contemporary approaches to comparative literature. It does so by exploring the encounter between a paradigmatic figure of European modernity, the flâneur, and contemporary Chinese poetry. The chapter first establishes how the flâneur emerges from the relationship between Europe and non-Europe and furnishes a comparative approach based not on mimesis and vision but on encounter, touch, and the non-logical constellations of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image. The chapter identifies the comparative poetics of the flâneur in the encounter between Chinese poet Duoduo 多多 and Charles Baudelaire’s “Le soleil” in the early 1970s. It then explores the elaboration and negation of the figure in 1980s xungen, or “root-seeking,” writing and especially in the poetry and prose written by Yang Lian 杨炼 during his exile in Auckland, New Zealand, after June 4, 1989.Less

Strange Lands

Louisa Gairn

in Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature

This chapter explores the confrontation of modernity and wilderness in Stevenson's fiction and travel writings, relating this to the work of John Muir and to ideas developed by Henry David Thoreau, ... More

This chapter explores the confrontation of modernity and wilderness in Stevenson's fiction and travel writings, relating this to the work of John Muir and to ideas developed by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Charles Baudelaire, taking up the idea of ‘exile’ in the context of the philosophy of ‘dwelling’ developed by ecotheorists. It notes that Stevenson's generation experienced an unprecedented acceleration of ‘progress’, where rapid developments in technology and urbanisation disrupted the idea of home and homeland. It further notes that progress for Stevenson and other Scots brought with it the possibility of international travel, and exposure to exotic lands and wilderness areas which appeared, to the Old World observer, as somehow ahistorical, a confusing mix of primordial nature and the markers of nineteenth-century modernity.Less

{Epilogue}

Elizabeth Amann

in Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut

The first part of the epilogue identifies a series of traits shared by the five figures examined in the study. The second part explores how aspects of the revolutionary vision of dandyism reappear in ... More

The first part of the epilogue identifies a series of traits shared by the five figures examined in the study. The second part explores how aspects of the revolutionary vision of dandyism reappear in nineteenth-century attempts to theorize the figure: specifically, Honoré de Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Charles Baudelaire’s “Le peintre de la vie moderne.”Less

The Poetics of Sensation in L’Africaine and Tristan und Isolde

Gabriela Cruz

in Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera

Chapter 5 investigates Meyerbeer’s and Wagner’s treatments of operatic perception and sensation in L’Africaine, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde. The discussion highlights the preoccupation with ... More

Chapter 5 investigates Meyerbeer’s and Wagner’s treatments of operatic perception and sensation in L’Africaine, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde. The discussion highlights the preoccupation with pleasure and innervation that the two composers shared during the late 1850s and 60s. The music dramaturgies of Wagner and Meyerbeer centered on exotic tress and poisonous blossoms are discussed in parallel, not to show, as others have done, what Wagner learned from Meyerbeer and improved upon, but rather to draw attention to the works’ shared preoccupation with enhanced perception and the role of dreamlike experience in the theater. This shared preoccupation is considered in light of Charles Baudelaire’s poetics of modernity.Less

The Books

in The Pataphysician's Library: An Exploration of Alfred Jarry's 'Livres pairs'

This chapter provides an overview of the entire library of Dr. Faustroll. The book in his library include Charles Baudelaire's translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Léon Bloy's Le Désespéré ... More

This chapter provides an overview of the entire library of Dr. Faustroll. The book in his library include Charles Baudelaire's translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Léon Bloy's Le Désespéré and Le Mendiant ingrate, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This chapter provides a description of the books and analyses the reasons for their presence on Faustroll's shelves, in other words, for Alfred Jarry's interest in them.Less

Putting the Horse before Descartes: Sensibility and the War on Pity

Kari Weil

in Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France

It was often said that Paris was paradise for women, purgatory for men and hell for horses. This hell is the focus of chapter 2 which opens with what had become an all too common scene of horse ... More

It was often said that Paris was paradise for women, purgatory for men and hell for horses. This hell is the focus of chapter 2 which opens with what had become an all too common scene of horse beatings on the streets of the city, also depicted by the popular novelist, Eugène Sue in his fictional biography of the first thoroughbred sire, Godolphin Arabian (1838). Especially striking in Sue’s tale is the apathy of the onlookers, offering an illustration of what Jacques Derrida has called an ongoing “war on pity” that had its origins around the time of the French Revolution. In order to “think this war” (and why Derrida finds it also to be about “thinking"), this chapter examines a range of texts from Rousseau to Baudelaire asking what pity was thought to be, and what role it was said to play in our relations to other animals. It also questions the role that pity for the suffering of animals played in the eventual founding of the French animal protection society and passing of anti-cruelty laws in 1850. Good for some animals, pity (like empathy) we also find, was good for business.Less