Baudelaire's Prose Poems Research Articles

Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems ed. by Cheryl Krueger

Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems ed. by Cheryl Krueger

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

Baudelaire and the Literary Fabrication of the Poor

Baudelaire and the Literary Fabrication of the Poor Maud Meyzaud (bio) By the time Baudelaire starts his work-in-progress prose-poems project, the Petits Poëmes en prose (1857–1865), also known as Le spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen),1 the poor, a recurrent protagonist of these short narratives, have already achieved a successful literary career of three decades. This evolution has mainly taken place in the rising genre of the novel, which, from the 1830s onward, interacts with an emerging mass public, whether one thinks of Dickens' Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress (1837–39), the Newgate novels, Eugène Sue's likewise widely popular Les mystères de Paris (1842–1843), George Sand's La mare au Diable (1846) or Francois le Champi (1847–48). At that time, Hugo's masterpiece, Les misérables (1862), which would have a tremendous impact on Baudelaire's prose poem project, is still to come. Because of its media-related feature, the serial novel both addresses the poor as its protagonist and enables literary works to reach social classes that cannot afford to buy a book. In this sense, it is not surprising that the very first work to be published in Paris in 1836 as a serial novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), is credited to have founded the genre of the picaresque novel, also called romance of roguery. During the same period, especially before the Revolution of 1848, the poor have been addressed by early socialist literature and even self-help books. By letting them enter several pieces of his prose poems, as is the case in "The Widows," "The Old Acrobat," "The Bad Glazier," "The Cake," "The Pauper's Toy," "The Eyes of the Poor," "The Counterfeit Coin," "Let's Beat Up the Poor!" and "The Good Dogs," Baudelaire is not only drawing on a former urban experience, but also on motifs, semantics and a rhetorical figure developed by his predecessors. One of the last drafted prose poems, "Assommons les pauvres" ("Let's Beat Up the Poor!"), does not stage an opening reading scene by chance.2 The scene connects the concerns of the prose poem explicitly with that time and implicitly warns the reader not to read what follows too literally, i.e., the narrator's testing of a reversed 'philanthropy' on a beggar. My concern is to ask to what extent the prose poems react to a general culture of philanthropy and a language of compassion to which not only theoretical positions contribute, but also novels such as Dickens' Oliver [End Page 156] Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, Eugène Sue's Les mystères de Paris or Victor Hugo's Les misérables, i.e., literature in the narrow sense of the word and Baudelaire's own field. Walter Benjamin's notion that Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal might have profited from the mere fact that its author did not write any novel (The Writer 167), applies even more accurately to his prose-poems project. In this sense, one can grasp this project per Jonathan Monroe as the "novelization of lyrics" (25). The European novel at that time embodies an understanding of prose that Baudelaire will be writing against, especially while drafting most of his pieces from 1860 to 1865. Given the direction taken by the European novel—say, 'realism' – on the one hand, and Baudelaire's search for what he coined himself in his essay "Le peintre de la vie moderne," 'modernity,' on the other,3 one can suspect the figures of the poor to be closely linked to the act of rewriting that characterizes his prose poems in general. The political relevance of this aesthetic operation becomes clear when, instead of linking it to the versified poems of Les fleurs du mal (as Barbara Johnson did in Défigurations du language poétique, her classic study on Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and his Paris Spleen), one chooses to focus on the political framing of the rhetorical operation by which the poor have been addressed by literature since then. I will show how Baudelaire's prose writing is directed against the rhetorical figure of 'giving a voice' to...

Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems ed. by Cheryl Krueger

Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems ed. by Cheryl Krueger

"L'Oiseau, le vent, la vague": Baudelairian Resonances in Colette's La Vagabonde

Colette's La Vagabonde (1910) tells the story of Renee Nere, an erstwhile successful novelist who embarks upon a career as a music hall performer in order to earn a living after divorcing her philandering and emotionally abusive husband. Her implicit vow to swear off love, primarily as a defense mechanism to prevent future suffering at the hands of a man, begins to fall by the wayside when a new suitor, Maxime Dufferein-Chautel, comes calling at her dressing room door after one of her performances. What drives the plot of this unique first-person narrative [qui] tient a la fois du journal, de la chronique et du roman epistolaire (Collado 86), is the conflict between Renee's competing desires--to give in to a physical relationship with a lover, on the one hand, or, on the other, to pursue self-fulfillment through meaningful creative work, safeguarding her hard-won independence in the process. The novel's very structure, with its alternating scenes in work and personal spaces, reflects this basic conflict. In the end, Renee rejects Max and all that he represents (wealth, patriarchy, traditional gender roles), her need for freedom and for self-expression eventually overriding that for intimacy. Though it may seem a bit of a stretch to mention in the same breath a novelist known for her exploration of women's agency and the inimitable poet Charles Baudelaire, the fact of the matter is that Colette is also celebrated for her evocative poetic descriptions, especially when it comes to landscapes, plants, and animals (particularly cats, a source of inspiration for Baudelaire as well). Jean Onimus, for example, affirms that [c]e qui frappe dans [sa] creation textuelle c'est la richesse, l'abondance, la justesse des metaphores (273). Diana Holmes, likewise, refers to Colette's playing with language as a system of sound and meaning (101)--which is of course what writing is all about--and even suggests that the narrative aspects may take a back seat to the poetic: [...] the pleasure of reading Colette lies less in the thrill of suspense and satisfaction provided by narrative, than in the contemplative, almost sensual delight of language (100-01). It might be said, conversely, that there is something decidedly novelistic about Baudelaire's prose poems. Margery Evans cites comments in the poet's 1859 Salon that imply that he saw the genre as being in some respects closer to the novel than to verse poetry (xi); the goal of her own book is to demonstrate how the text [...] sets itself up for comparison with the novel and with classic texts by the great moralists, calling into question the codes governing those genres, just as it calls into question the conventions of lyric poetry (xii). That La Vagabonde and Le Spleen de Paris have in common this blurring of generic boundaries suggests that reading the two works together might reveal some fascinating resonances.1 In the final scene of La Vagabonde, Renee sneaks back to her apartment in the wee hours of the morning after being on tour for several weeks, intending to leave a lettre de rupture for Max--who assumes she will marry him upon her return--a letter which she has effectively been writing in her mind the entire time she has been away. It is the physical distance from the object of her desire, in addition to the freedom to write that travel affords her, which enable her to 'write herself away' from Max and back to her literary craft. Although Renee may be confident about her decision, she knows herself well enough to recognize that letting Max go will prove challenging: Je m'echappe, mais je ne suis pas quitte encore de toi, Renee concedes, [v]agabonde, et libre, je souhaiterai parfois l'ombre de tes murs [...]. Ah! Tu seras longtemps une des soifs de ma route! (248). The word ombre seen here is something of a motif in the novel, used to portray either Max's appropriation of Renee's space or a sort of fragmentation of her own self. …

Fin de Baudelaire: autopsie d'une uvre sans nom

Jean-Louis Cornille's study is that rare exception: a critical work in French on Baudelaire's prose poems that does not regard them as the poor cousin of Les Fleurs du mal. He counters this generally dismissive francophone attitude towards Le Spleen de Paris, as well as the opposite prejudice held by many anglophone Baudelaireans who lavish praise on its quintessentially modern ‘poétique de la fragmentation’, by demonstrating, through meticulous close readings, that it possesses an internal logic and structural unity all of its own that rivals the much-vaunted ‘architecture secrète’ of the verse poems. Two main structuring principles are invoked that bear testimony to Baudelaire's practice of reworking his earlier material, both from within the collection itself and outside it. The first, ‘concatenation’ (a term Cornille borrows from fellow Baudelaire scholar Alain Vaillant), refers to those prose poems that provide ironic commentaries on their immediate predecessors; the second, ‘circularity’, refers to the ‘recyclage’ of larger, discrete clusters of poems: the first twenty-six prose poems not only revisit themes from Les Fleurs du mal, but they are themselves reworked by the final twenty-four. This approach could be considered too methodical were it not for the fact that Cornille pertinently relates Le Spleen de Paris to key episodes in Baudelaire's personal life. Many poems give vent to his frustrations, insecurities, and unresolved conflicts: his allusion to eight authors in ‘Les Bons Chiens’ recalls those eight members of the Académie française he courted in a failed bid to join its illustrious ranks; his subversion of negative gender and racial stereotypes in ‘La Belle Dorothée’ signals his closer bond to his lover Jeanne Duval's black mother than to his own; the fragility of political and artistic power relations in ‘Une mort héroïque’ and of friendship in ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ are vengeful allegories of his sense of profound betrayal at the hands of his publisher Arsène Houssaye. This intimate link between the biographical and the textual is further reinforced by Baudelaire's proto-Mallarmean predilection for anagrams and wordplay: to take just one memorable example, ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ rhymes with Arsène Houssaye. Subtle and provocative too is Cornille's contention that the boundaries between the ‘autotextuel’ and ‘intertextuel’ are sometimes blurred: ‘Laquelle est la vraie’ is thus arguably less inspired by Poe's ‘Berenice’ than it is by Baudelaire's own translation of the American's short story. Occasionally, Cornille succumbs to the danger of overinterpretation: is the ‘liasse de papiers’ in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ really to be understood as an allusion to Baudelaire's earlier poems? He also slightly overstates, despite a trenchant comparison of cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Philippe Muray, Baudelaire's anti-Hugolien rejection of the occult (his debt to Swedenborg barely gets a mention). Overall, however, this perceptive study, despite the absence of an index and though primarily of interest to the specialist, intelligently repositions Le Spleen de Paris within the broader context of Baudelaire's opus and intellectual influences, including his translations and correspondence, as well as offering a timely reminder that biographical readings of great literary figures need not be anachronistic or reductive.

Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert by Kathryn Oliver Mills (review)

Kathryn Oliver Mills, Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. 200 pp. Scholarly and other professional achievements strengthen a faculty member's teaching and make The University of the South a vital intellectual community. Kathryn Mills has the skills to make significant contributions to her academic discipline as a scholar and critic. She has enjoyed several accomplishments in the area of scholarship during the past years. She made available her research by publishing articles and by attending conferences to gain favorable peer recognition within her discipline of nineteenth-century French literary studies. Most important, she completed a book entitled Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, from the University of Delaware Press. The book deals with these two authors' novelty and modernity, defined as a reconfiguration of the generic boundaries between poetry and prose, by bringing formal, thematic, and historical considerations to bear on Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and Gustave Flaubert's Trois contes, as well as by setting those works in the context of the authors' other works of literature and literary criticism. Kathryn Mills argues that the critical studies, which recognize that Baudelaire and Flaubert were at the crossroads of a traditional era and a modern one, emphasized endings in Les Fleurs du mal, Madame Bovary, L'Education sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pecuchet by defining these works with respect to the past. Such literary masterpieces have helped define modern poetry and the modern novel, but the technical innovations of these novels were deployed within the traditional genres of the novel and of poetry in verse. In other words, critics focus on the literary structures Baudelaire and Flaubert were looking back at, and moving away from, rather than on the new forms toward which they were moving. Kathryn Mills positions herself against a certain trend of critics who have defined Baudelaire and Flaubert's contributions to modernity as an innovative ability to modulate traditional forms in order to express the inadequacy of those forms in the face of modern times. She claims that both writers' interest in finding a new literary form ultimately went further than variations on standard literary structures. Changing times and thoughts both elicit and require new literary forms. Le Spleen de Paris and Trois contes, for a variety of reasons, have been less represented in general discussions of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and Kathryn Mills demonstrates that the extent to which Baudelaire's prose poems and Flaubert's poetic tales diverge from the rest of their works is also the extent to which these works are particularly striking embodiments of their authors' artistic ideals. For these two seminal authors, the language of modernity involves an exploration of the boundaries between poetry and prose. Kathryn Mills's compelling argument even goes further, daring to venture that Baudelaire and Flaubert launched what amounted to a formal revolution--hence her title. Each writer advocated a revolution in form. For both writers, formal revolution turned around the heightened importance of prose. Baudelaire and Flaubert were both born in 1821, and Kathryn Mills argues that Flaubert is Baudelaire's counterpoint in the medium of prose. They had echoing sentiments about the need for a new, modern form in a changing day and age. The book is divided into six chapters. The first four are on Baudelaire, and the last two, on Flaubert. In the first chapter, Kathryn Mills launches her thesis and explains that Baudelaire's last Voyage in verse at the end of Les Fleurs du trial fails to discover something new on practical, existential, and literary levels. In her second chapter, she establishes new and definitive links between Constantin Guys and Joseph de Maistre's works and Baudelaire's Le Peintre de la vie mode me, whose composition and publication not only coincided chronologically with Baudelaire's interest in these works, but occurred in parallel with the poet's transition to prose poetry. …

The Poet’s Place: William Carlos Williams and the Production of an American Avant-Garde

Poets in Exile MODERNITY'S grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling (510). Susan Stanford Friedman's conception of in the previous sentence captures in miniature what many other critics noted: is overreaching, unstable, and, above all, contradictory.1 Friedman's conception of also leads to understanding modernism as a form of critical which suggests rather than being the sanctioned aesthetic of modernity, as we might assume from its name, that modernism is modernity's active, and radical, antagonist (Somigli 5). As Astradur Eysteinsson says in Concept of Modernism, modernism is attempt to interrupt the that we live and understand as a social, if not 'normal,' way of life and is thus a concept [ . . . ] signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginning in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world (6, 2). Luca Somigli narrows Eysteinsson's definition by arguing that modernism developed as a response to the fallen condition of the poet in modernity (9). In making this argument he refers to the example of Charles Baudelaire, and in particular Baudelaire's prose poem Lost Halo - a text Somigli argues provides an allegory for the cultural crisis that poets faced in the latter half of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.2 With the triumph of capital ist and positivist science and the entrenchment and institutionalization of their attendant grand narratives, individuals who found themselves outside of those narratives were made to wonder who, what, and where they were (Somigli 7). Modernity, after all, if it is understood as a grand narrative (or multiple grand narratives), would seem to be offering solutions to the problems of history. Modernity's solutions, however, are necessarily exclusive. Baudelaire brings to the surface what these Utopian projects suppressed in their rise to ideological dominance, and what has ultimately been left out of their final solutions. exclusion most significant for Baudelaire, of course, is that the poet, or at least the poet as he had been historically understood, seems to no place in the projects of modernity.3 Baudelaire allegorizes the predicament of the modern poet with a story of a poet who loses his halo while crossing a busy boulevard. Another man, recognizing the halo-less poet in a house of ill fame, drinking quintessences and eating ambrosia, addresses the poet, and eventually asks whether or not the poet, in an attempt to get his halo back, will put out a notice or have the police advertise for it. poet replies, Good God no! I'm fine here. You're the only one who recognized me. Besides, dignity irks me. And I'm glad to think that some bad poet will pick it up and insolently stick it on his head. Make someone happy, what a delight! And especially a happy someone I can laugh at! What about X, or Z! Right! Wouldn't that be funny! (Baudelaire 113) Somigli argues that what Baudelaire lays bare in this text is that the loss of the halo, the symbolic insignia of the poet's social status and function, is the result of a transformation that pushes him to the margins of capitalist economy (9). In Walter Benjamin's terms, the poet, a remnant of precapitalist society, is evacuated of his aura. This has real benefits according to Baudelaire, in that the poet is now able to come into contact with cultural realms from which his halo had previously kept him apart; however, these contacts come at the price of his public voice. No longer do poets an exalted place from which to speak; lacking their haloes, nothing now sanctions their voices other than that which sanctions everything in modernity: money. Baudelaire's prose poem thus enacts in miniature, as Marshall Berman points out, the historical development that Marx and Engels describe in Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked to with reverent awe. …

Insinuation: Detournement as Gendered Repetition

This essay examines how key Situationist concepts—the spectacle and détournement—are gendered. The first half of the essay presents these concepts along with a discussion of Asger Jorn's and Isidore Isou's gendered theories of creation and a reading of the figure of Jack the Ripper in Guy Debord and Jorn's book Mémoires. The second half of the essay argues that one of Debord's sources, Baudelaire's prose poem “Solitude,” presents a concept—“insinuation”—that offers a model for rethinking détournement as something other than the masculinized overcoming of spectacular passivity.

Chirurgie et Esthétique Baudelairienne

Scholars have indicated several possible sources for Baudelaire's prose poem 'Mademoiselle Bistouri': a journalistic piece by Adrien Marx, a poem by Mathurin Régnier, and even extracts from Madame Bovary. This essay will argue that the poet uses these intertextual references to rewrite his own history. Not only does he recall his own early and rather obscure writings, but he also re-enacts one of the most painful events in his career: the mutilation of his Fleurs du mal, condemned in 1857. Indeed, multiple elements in 'Mademoiselle Bistouri' refer to Baudelaire's own first steps as a writer — allusions that allegorize, through the figure of Mademoiselle Bistouri, the 'surgical' intervention that disfigured his only collection of verses.

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in The Parisian Prowler (review)

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in The Parisian Prowler (review)

Towards a Post-Levinasian Approach to Narrativity: Facing Baudelaire's "Eyes of the Poor"

In spite of Emmanuel Levinas's famous criticism of narratives as artistic representations, the essay argues that we should construct a "post-Levinasian" approach to narrativity that would both respect the ethical priority of the Other, and go beyond Levinas by taking into account narrative techniques, as well as the historical and political contexts. As an example, the essay analyzes different encounters that take place in Baudelaire's prose poem "The Eyes of the Poor." In the narrator's inevitable failure of reading the face of the Other we can perhaps hear the singular way in which, to quote Levinas, "across all literature the human face speaks —or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature."

Baudelaire's 'Le Spleen de Paris': Shifting Perspectives by Maria C. Scott

MLR, I0I.4, 2oo6 1129 The second section offers us a parallel reading by Sarga Houssa of the Voyage en Orient as done by Lamartine and by Nerval, followed by Hisashi Mizuno's work manlike analysis of Nerval's commentaries onWagner's aesthetics: there is nothing particularly new in either paper. The third article, by Corinne Bayle, presents a fas cinating confrontation of Nerval's sonnet sequence Le Christ aux Oliviers with two paintings by Chasseriau of the same subject. There are some original insights into both Nerval and Chasseriau, as well as into the relationships between poetry and painting. It is in the third section, 'Figurations', that we find the most interesting contri butions of the volume. In a concise and brilliant article, Bertrand Marchal unpacks the symbolic and thematic ramifications of the chimere for both the sonnet sequence bearing the name and forNerval's work as awhole. Daniel Sangsue analyses anumber of aspects of the theme of revenance and the figure of the mort vivant inNerval, and as the final paper in this section Michel Brix offers a study of the impossible erotics of Nerval, in both its ironic and pathetic dimensions. The final section, 'Voisinages', is themost heterogeneous and least satisfying group of papers. However, one article, Jerome Thelot's virtuoso study of the slim output of Maurice de Guerin, makes some suggestive rapprochements with Nerval around the themes of memoire and poesie. All in all, this collection is a timely contribution toNerval studies in the run-up to the bicentenary of his birth, with a sufficient number of interesting papers tomake this volume aworthwhile acquisition for a specialist library. UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES MAURICE BLACKMAN Baudelaire's 'Le Spleen de Paris': Shifting Perspectives. By MARIA C. SCOTT. (Stu dies in European Cultural Transition, 29) Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. 238 pp. ?47.50. ISBN o-7546-5IiI-8. The principal aim of this study of Baudelaire's prose poems is an examination of the shifting perspectives on the viewpoint of the narrator, who, we are frequently reminded, must not be confused with the poet himself. It comprises five chapters on perspectives current in recent criticism: caricature, prostitution, morality, allegory, and aesthetics. The author makes no claim to being exhaustive. Indeed, her approach is consciously limited and partial, focusing on about two-thirds of the collection. The emphasis throughout is on the poet's taste formystification and the consequent nar rative, aesthetic, and moral uncertainties that have stimulated the ingenuity of recent commentators. By her own confession she rarely ventures a totalizing explanation, being forced by the nature of the subject to perpetuate the sense of uncertainty. The author appears in total command of the critical corpus that has grown round Le Spleen de Paris and her erudition is nothing if not impressive, but the reader cannot on oc casion avoid a sense of frustration at the emerging critical stasis. The commentaries abound with qualifying expressions such as 'itmay be that', 'itmight be', 'possibly', 'it is possible that', 'itwould seem', somuch so that one is led towonder what exactly has been gained by so many tentative interpretations. For example, the chapter on prostitution contains a fascinating discussion of the social and legal conditions in nineteenth-century Paris. This together with an account of Regnier's satire, which Baudelaire mentions, leads to a possible 'alternative perspective' (p. 72) thatMade moiselle Bistouri's obsession with doctors and surgery could have had something to do with abortion. Scott stresses that such a diagnosis is purely hypothetical, but jus tified because it underlines our 'incomplete knowledge of "Mademoiselle Bistouri" and of its author's intentions' (p. 72). But there is confusion here between the poem, which is relatively transparent, and the character, who remains amystery. Any one II30 Reviews explanation would greatly diminish the impact and the scope of the poem, and go counter to the poet's intention, which is to convey the scandal and mystery ofmadness and of the 'monstre innocent'. Echos from other works are sometimes made to influence the possible reading of a poem without due regard to context. The title of 'Le Chien et le flacon' recalls the prologue toGargantua, which compares the diligent reader to a...

Reading and Otherness: The Interpretative Triangle in Baudelaireis Petits poemes en prose

"Les Yeux des pauvres" and "Les F�netres," among other of Baudelaire's prose poems, dramatize a speaking subject's interpretive acts in a way that mimics the reading process itself. Mirroring the ways in which we read ourselves in others, these poems also make evident a triangulation of interpretation that problematizes any straightforward identification of self and other. This article explores the critical triangle that develops within the poems among the interpreting subject, the third-person object of interpretation, and the second-person interlocutor who challenges the subject's perceptions. It argues that the radical other of this formation is the second person and studies the implications of the dynamic intersubjective tension between speaker and interlocutor for our own critical processes. (kmr)

The "Poet-Philosopher" and the "Physician-Philosopher": A Reading of Baudelaire's Prose Poem "Assommons les pauvres!"

In the second half of the nineteenth century, French alienists, imbued with the ambitions of the emerging psychiatric discipline, often regarded themselves as public figures. They did not hesitate to speak to philosophical, social, political, and even aesthetic matters. Louis Fran�ois L�lut is a case in point: in Du d�mon de Socrate (1836) he used his medical expertise to diagnose Socrates as a lunatic. In the wake of the Revolution of 1848, he launched a fierce critique against proponents of equality such as Proudhon (Egalit�, 1849). Through an analysis of Baudelaire's prose poem "Assommons les pauvres!" this essay explores Baudelaire's subversive critique of L�lut's intellectual claims. Baude-laire depicts a narrator who displays similarities with the allegedly "lunatic" Socrates and yet defies any simplistic equation between philosophical "genius" _EnD_and pathology. Baudelaire's parody is directed at L�lut's medical and political views: the narrator's stand on equality overtly challenges L�lut's inegalitarian beliefs. (FV)

The Other Other: Baudelaire, Melancholia, and the Dandy

Charles Baudelaire, one of nineteenth-century France's most prominent dan-dies, cites melancholia as one of the most striking features of dandyism. The dandy's melancholia seems to acquire special connotations in Baudelaire's typology: it takes form as a symbolic crisis that coincides with the phallicization of the male body. The connotations of this crisis are perhaps best illustrated in Baudelaire's prose poem, "Assommons les pauvres." The poem's confrontation between two dimensions of male selfhood signals a displacement and obfuscation of masculine desire in phallic culture. The confusion integral to phallic culture's conception of the masculine fur-ther resonates in Baudelaire's sometimes startling attitudes regarding women, fashion, and cosmetics. (PGH)

Book Review. Baudelaire's Prose Poems. The Practice and Politics of Irony Sonya Stephens

Book Review. Baudelaire's Prose Poems. The Practice and Politics of Irony Sonya Stephens

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony

1. Thresholds 2. Lyricism and its Others 3. The Politics of Form 4. The Prose Poem and the Dualities of Comic Art Select Bibliography Index

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (review)

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (review)

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (review)

This careful, clearly focused study delimits the essential characteristics of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en prose, no longer neglected by scholars, as the author explains in her helpful preface. In four large chapters, well documented with textual analyses (the citations remaining in French) and generous references to previous interpreters, Sonya Stephens advances our understanding of the polemics internal to the prose poems, using key texts to open these self-reflective fables (as I prefer to call them) to more sophisticated readings, showing particularly how Baudelaire deploys his political, ethical, literary, and esthetic values through various modes of irony.