Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity

by Patricia A. Ward (Editor)

Overview

Charles Baudelaire, possibly the most influential author of nineteenth-century France, created a poetics of modernity and a thematics of the city; he transcended genre by moving between poetry and prose. He is also the most accessible of modern French poets to an American readership. These essays examine Baudelaire's poetics and the complex relationship between the poet and his twentieth-century literary heirs, including Rene Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Michel Deguy.

The contributors, who include Deguy and Bonnefoy, are all distinguished writers or critics noted for their own poetry or for their scholarship on Baudelaire and in French studies. Their essays go to the heart of what makes Baudelaire so important: his modernity and his influence from the very beginning on other poets, including those outside of France. The essays are written in English, with citations from Baudelaire and other sources in both French and English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826513779
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2000
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Patricia A. Ward is professor of French and comparative literature at Vanderbilt University, where she has served as chair of the department of French and Italian and as acting director of the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies. Her books include The Medievalism of Victor Hugo and Joseph Joubert and the Critical Tradition.

Table of Contents

Contents
Aesthetic Categories
1. Modern Beauty versus Platonist Beauty,
Michel Brix (trans. Tony Campbell)
2. The Linguistic Turning of the Symbol: Baudelaire and his French Symbolist Heirs, William Franke
3. Gautier as "Seer" of the Origins of Modernity in Baudelaire, Lois Cassandra Hamrick

Poetry and Painting
4. Strangers in the Park: Manet, Baudelaire, and La Musique aux Tuileries, Sima Godfrey
5. The Subject of Le Peintre de la vie moderne,
Timothy Raser
6. Off the Charts: Walter Benjamin's Depiction of Baudelaire, Kevin Newmark
7. "La Belle Dorothée," or Poetry and Painting,
Yves Bonnefoy (trans. Jan Plug)

Questions of Genre
8. Baudelaire Sonneteer: Flare to the Future, Rosemary Lloyd
9. Prose and Prosody: Baudelaire and the Handling of Genres, Jean-Christophe Bailly (trans. Jan Plug)
10. Contingencies and Discontinuities of Lyric I: Baudelaire as Poet-Narrator and Diarist,
Sonya Stephens

Reformulations
11. Modernity's Curse, Susan Blood
12. (S)(m)othering Baudelaire, Margaret Miner
13. Suffering and Expenditure: Baudelaire and Nietzsche in Char's Poetic Territory, Van Kelly
14. To Spear It on the Mark, of Mystical Nature,
Michel Deguy (trans. Wilson Baldridge)