Le Spleen De Paris Research Articles

“Prendre Un Bain De Multitude”: Origins of the Flâneur in Baudelaire’s Translations of De Quincey

ABSTRACT For many contemporary readers, the flâneur is synonymous with the Paris of Baudelaire, its Haussmannised Grands Boulevards, and the so-called “bain de multitude”—that is, the idea of the crowd as immersive spectacle. In his reading of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin points to texts like “Les Foules,” from Le Spleen de Paris, as well as “L’Homme des foules,” a translation of Poe, as interpretive keys to understanding the Baudelairian flâneur. However, Benjamin overlooks an earlier and arguably more important text of Baudelaire’s on the subject: 1860’s Les Paradis artificiels. Baudelaire’s extended study of drug use and creativity is comprised mainly of a translation and adaptation of Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 memoir, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. As their titles suggest, both the Confessions and Les Paradis artificiels are centred mainly on addiction; but they are also, on a core level, texts about modernity, the urban space, and the flâneur (or the “peripatetic,” as De Quincey calls him). This article considers Baudelaire’s translation of De Quincey’s crowdscapes in Les Paradis artificiels and the re-emergence of De Quinceyan imagery and expressions in Baudelaire’s subsequent writing on flânerie and the modern city.

Le Spleen de Paris: An ‘unknown’ masterpiece?

The article explores the origins of Baudelaire’s final book, Paris Spleen. Little Prose Poems [ Le Spleen de Paris. Petits Poèmes en Prose ] in relation to the poet’s recently discovered letter to the publisher A. Houssaye. Supplying a Russian translation of this dedication to Houssaye, penned by Baudelaire as a preface to the Little Prose Poems , the author also offers its interpretation. The closing paragraphs contain an analysis of the principal and manifesto-like aspects of the dedication. Stating that no one can say about his new work that it has ‘neither head nor tail,’ Baudelaire alludes to the trite expression which describes ‘incoherence’ in French, but which the poet effortlessly transforms into an expanded metaphor of a serpent. In other words, rather than merely dedicating his poems to the editor-in-chief of La Presse , the poet lavishes on him a ‘poisoned gift.’ The poet loathed the newspaper civilisation, but, unlike the ‘aristocratic party’ of French literature, could not afford to withdraw into an ‘ivory tower’ and so had to resort to stratagems to cooperate with the Fourth Estate. The dedication to Houssaye effectively constitutes such a ploy.

O que há de poesia no animal: uma análise da “prosa em prosa” de Jean-Marie Gleize

This article seeks to introduce the work of the contemporary French poet Jean-Marie Gleize, starting with theoretical assumptions that he himself proposes based on his studies of French poetry, with a focus on modern poetry. It is then analyzed what will lead him to advocate the writing of what he named “prose in prose,” based on an observation, mainly, of the Baudelairian work and the change that seemed to take place in the poet’s writing between his first book of poems, Les fleurs du mal (2016), and the second, Le spleen de Paris (2007). Making also an analysis of the figures of dogs and cats that appear differently in each of these works, Gleize proposes a vision of the “dog” linked to this “prosified” poetry, more connected to the city and to reality itself, which is the writing he defends in the face of modern life. The article will also make propositions, therefore, about an “animalistic” writing that seems to have been suggested by other writers, based on the analysis of animal studies.

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf

Reviewed by: Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf Jeremy Tambling Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty. By Peggy Kamuf. New York: Fordham University Press. 2018. 161 pp. $25. ISBN 978–0–8232–8229–6. Peggy Kamuf translated the first of two volumes of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, published posthumously, called The Death Penalty; these transcripts appeared in English from Chicago University Press in 2014 and 2015. She says nothing about her work of translation, but her book offers footnotes, as it were, to Derrida’s work, which itself gives a fascinating range of arguments against the death penalty, drawing many examples from French literature: thus Hugo and Camus appear in both Derrida and Kamuf, and Kamuf analyses Baudelaire through the récit given in Le Spleen de Paris, translated here as ‘A Heroic Death’. Kafka appears here; while there are chapters on Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’, an account of an execution he was responsible for in colonial Burma (Myanmar), and on two American texts: Robert Coover’s A Public Burning (1977), his treatment of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979). The American emphasis reflects Kamuf’s desire to concentrate on America’s history: apparently ending capital punishment in the early 1970s, only to reintroduce it, Gary Gilmore being the first to die under the new permission to kill in 1977. Gilmore (Mailer’s subject), shot for a double murder, brings out an irony Kamuf explores: Gilmore wanted to be executed and refused to appeal against his sentence; lawyers tried to save him because of the precedent that would give for capital [End Page 108] punishment to resume in America. And where much of the rest of the world has abolished the death penalty, America, Kamuf says with further irony, ‘is struggling to survive in a largely hostile world’ given the protection of secrecy, everything to do with execution even being exempted by law from the Freedom of Information Act (pp. 65–66). The interest in discussing the death penalty through literature comes from Derrida claiming that literature, not philosophy, has advanced the cause of abolition, and that literature always speaks against it: ‘literature’, as Derrida considers it, is distinct from ‘belles-lettres and poetry’ (Kamuf’s quotation, p. 19); it is modern, post-French Revolution, metatextual, almost halfway towards theory; Kamuf quotes Derrida saying that it ‘has the right to say anything’ (p. 23)—that being almost a definition of modern literature, as with Blanchot, another writer discussed. (This modernism cannot really claim Orwell, but interestingly, Kamuf has good things to say about him.) Such a literature is essential for a democracy and can only live in one; its power is to question the death penalty, which is read as a particular aim to define the limits of life, terminating its openness to chance. Kamuf makes good points about literature as a witness to capital punishment—a witness being essential to say that an ‘execution’ (a word whose etymology she traces) has taken place. The chapter on Coover shows how modern executions demand secrecy, and how they relate to the obscene. The death penalty is ‘driven by the urge to indecent exposure, which has to call up the contrary drive to keep hidden what should not be exposed’ (p. 82): in this novel, the Rosenbergs are made to die publicly, as a way of bringing home what that shamefulness involves; Kamuf here invokes Freud’s idea of the passage à l’acte, an acting out of unconscious desires (p. 85)—disavowed desires projected in front of spectators who can see what they have repressed. The book is full of sharply suggestive points, mostly unusual in debates of this sort, affirming literature’s inherent value in contesting the absoluteness of the death penalty, cutting off life and language together. Jeremy Tambling SWPS Warsaw Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Creative Confinement and Narratives of Violence: Charles Baudelaire, Shumona Sinha and Assommons les pauvres!

This article examines the relationship between Baudelaire’s prose poem, “Assommons les pauvres!” (Le Spleen de Paris, 1869) and Shumona Sinha’s 2011 novel of the same title. Focusing on questions of reading and intertextuality, from Baudelaire’s reference to Proudhon to Sinha’s engagement with the prose poem and Le Spleen de Paris more broadly, it explores forms of confinement and creativity, the connections between narrative and freedom and the ways in which lyrical subjectivity and literary form reflect the social challenges of each period. In expressing socio-cultural and linguistic alienation, these texts centre the textual in an exploration of the marginal, thereby demonstrating that the connection between them goes beyond a critical act of violence and the presumed equality or dignity it confers, to represent a shared interrogation of universalism, multiculturalism, and authorial and political power.

Le spleen de Paris: facets of melancholy in the Lyrics of Baudelaire

ABSTRACT The traditional conception of the link between Melancholia and a creative disposition finds its climax in the artistic-literary environment of France in the nineteenth century in Baudelaire’s poetry: he illustrates this paradigm by praising Spleen and Idéal, depicting the interplay of sweetness and bitterness as a specific and aesthetic principle that his ‘sickly flowers’ are based on. But the mental gloom of the spleen can also have its paralyzing shadows. How spleen, ennui and melancholia behave to each other and how the poet confirms the classical conception of genius, will emerge by facing Baudelaire’s mourning cult. With Spleen as a central motif of his poetry his lyrical work represents simultaneously the perception of modern times: the culture of the black tails enters the streets of Paris. Starting from the poet’s observations of the morbid city, the contribution proceedes to other cornerstones from fine arts and music that illuminate the position of mélancolie in the new feeling culture within the hexagon.

“Discourses of Displacement” in the Ethnography of Léon-Gontran Damas and Poetry of Charles Baudelaire

It is not far-fetched to imagine that the French underclass that occupied the city streets Charles Baudelaire roamed as a flâneur could have turned up in the bagne, or penal colony, described by the Negritude poet Léon Damas in his ethnographic field work in Guyane. Through a literary analysis of Damas’ ethnography, Retour de Guyane (1938), in tandem with a selection of prose-poems by Baudelaire from Le Spleen de Paris (1869) and Les Fleurs du mal (1857), this article calls attention to the parallels between the observational methods of urban spectatorship they use to collect case studies for their writing. The interpretive approach I use acknowledges the crossover between literary creativity and sociological analysis and is informed by a theoretical framework that couples Negritude’s anticolonialism with carceral studies. My analysis of these texts is situated in the context of the French Third Republic’s laws against recidivism and vagrancy in the late nineteenth century, which carried the penalty of forced deportation to distant penal colonies, a punitive practice that continued into the early twentieth century. In Baudelaire’s case, changing sociopolitical circumstances in light of Hausmannisation necessitated new modes of how writers dealt with the capital city’s exclusionary development. In the case of Damas, his critique of mise en valeur culture and exploitative colonial scholarship prompted his departure from the conventional practice of salvage ethnography that feigned inclusive objectivity. The article focuses on passages that highlight overlapping colonial and carceral attributes within both the colony and metropole. In conclusion, I argue that Damas’ condemnation of the mission civilisatrice, alongside Baudelaire’s contestation of degraded urban environments, point towards a poetics of colonial society’s intoxication with power.

FIVE PROSE POEMS

The Yale ReviewVolume 107, Issue 3 p. 86-93 POETRY FIVE PROSE POEMS CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE Poet, essayist, art critic, and translator. Le Spleen de Paris (1869), which includes the work translated in this issue, was posthumously published one hundred and fifty years ago.Search for more papers by this author CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE Poet, essayist, art critic, and translator. Le Spleen de Paris (1869), which includes the work translated in this issue, was posthumously published one hundred and fifty years ago.Search for more papers by this author First published: 05 July 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/yrev.13529AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume107, Issue3July 2019Pages 86-93 RelatedInformation

Baudelaire’s Bedrooms

ABSTRACTBaudelaire’s ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ still fascinates scholars because of the narrator’s enigmatic hatred for the eponymous ‘bad glazier.’ Walter Benjamin (2010. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Howard Eiland et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press) emphasized Baudelaire’s originality in describing the shock of encountering modernity, which might explain the narrator’s actions, while other critics examined this animosity from psychoanalytic angles. This article turns, instead, to the power of space—namely, the architecture of 19th-Century Paris as lived social space—influencing the narrator’s odd behaviour. ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier,’ like several other poems in Le Spleen de Paris, takes place in the private space of the narrator’s bedroom. Surprisingly little has been written about the effect of that space on the narrator, and I address this lacuna, touring the bedrooms depicted in Le Spleen de Paris to show how they represent the architectural milieu of Paris in their layout, position in their building, and view of the street. I claim that this space – set in a 6th-floor garret – represents a kind of Foucauldian prison in its ability to structure inhabitants’ behaviours. These bedroom cells are also the sites of fantasies where the narrator dreams of luxurious commodity objects. The narrator’s lashing out stems in part from his reaction against this ‘imprisonment’ and his loss of agency in consumer culture: he is a mere consumer whose ideal is to possess objects. Ultimately, Baudelaire’s bedrooms stand for the social space that shapes the narrator, challenging us to rethink our lifestyle within the private sphere.

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...

Baudelaire and Other People

Baudelaire and Other People Maria Scott and Alexandra K. Wettlaufer OVER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS after the death of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), his work remains a focus of interest and investigation for scholars of modernity across a range of disciplines and discourses. In this issue of L'Esprit Créateur, we propose that one reason Baudelaire's œuvre continues to be such a key point of reference for art historians, cultural historians, urban studies specialists, and literary scholars is that his writings—his poetry, prose, and criticism—explore a phenomenon that continues to be a major preoccupation today, namely, what it means to live in permanent proximity to other people. Closely associated with the definition and experience of modernity itself, Baudelaire inhabited the urban landscape of Second Empire Paris, a quasi-anonymous denizen of the crowded parks and boulevards. Manet aptly captures this modern social identity in La musique aux Tuileries (cover illustration), where the top-hatted author of "Les foules" is portrayed in profile against the trunk of a tree, one of a myriad of fashionable Parisians gathered in the gardens behind the elegant pair of lavender-bonneted women who dominate the foreground of the painting. Looking at this picture, it is difficult to imagine that, for many readers and critics, Baudelaire embodies the solitary individual whose psychic, moral, poetic, and even physical integrity is threatened by the presence of other people, or what one of his prose poems describes as "la tyrannie de la face humaine."1 Indeed, for Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire's defensive stance against the gaze of other people is what defines him and his work.2 The theme of autrui is equally central to Walter Benjamin's essays and notes on Baudelaire. Benjamin argues that Baudelaire's verse and prose poetry bear witness to the shock effects produced by life in a modern city and to the mechanisms developed to defend the psyche against the potential violence of random encounters with others.3 Crowded urban spaces produce at least as much anxiety and exhilaration today as they did in Baudelaire's time; encounters with strangers, whether in person or on social media, continue to be a source of both unease and pleasure. Ross Chambers, whose death in 2017 was a grievous loss for French studies, places the various interpersonal croisements that took place in the busy streets of Second Empire Paris at the heart of his exploration of Baudelaire's poetry.4 For the critic Edward Kaplan, similarly, Baudelaire's poetry, in both verse and prose, places the relation between self and other at its very core; Kaplan shows how the poet's work challenges presuppositions about sameness [End Page 1] and difference through complex dialogic interchange.5 Our collection of articles similarly locates the self-other relation at its center, proposing fresh interpretations of Baudelaire's thinking about other people, and showing how the otherness of other people was negotiated by this founding figure of European modernity. Organized in three sections, "Baudelaire and Other People" first considers how the other is constructed in Baudelaire's poetry, then turns to Baudelaire's relationships with other poets, whether as reader or object of reading, and concludes with the role played by other arts and other artists not only in Baudelaire's poetry and criticism, but also in interpretations of his work. In our first section, "Baudelaire's Poetic Others: Theorizing and Realizing Autrui," authors examine the representation of encounters with other people in Les fleurs du mal and Le spleen de Paris. In her analysis of "À une passante" and "Les veuves," Sarah Gubbins explores the role played by both "generic baggage" and pre-existing assumptions in the perception of other people—in this case widows—in Baudelaire's verse and prose poetry. Kevin Newmark's reading of "Les sept vieillards" considers what the "loss of self" at the heart of Baudelaire's encounters with the other might entail and the possibility that it might be merely a provisional loss that allows for an even greater measure of self-possession and understanding in its wake. Maria Scott's essay, engaging with a currently topical theme in psychology and cognitive literary studies, approaches the meeting...

Destabilizing the Other in Baudelaire-Bertrand-Rimbaud

This joint article proposes a comparative encounter involving Baudelaire-Bertrand-Rimbaud to show that pieces of verse and prose by Charles Baudelaire and Aloysius Bertrand are as much about split identities as Arthur Rimbaud's poetry foregrounding the demise of Cartesian unity in the I. We assess the other as a locus of contrasts in the verse of Bertrand's Boutade bacchique and Baudelaire's Alchimie de la douleur from Les fleurs du mal, then distinguish prose-based manifestations of the other in Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris alongside Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, before considering others as a heterogeneous collective in Rimbaud's Parade from Illuminations.

An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers

Reviewed by: An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck Chambers, Ross. An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise. New York, Fordham UP, 2015. Pp. 208. $35.00 US hardcover. Ross Chambers's penetrating essay focuses on Baudelaire's late works: the major verse poems of Tableaux parisiens, which were included in the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal in 1861, and the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, an unfinished project at the time of Baudelaire's death in 1867. While still holding artistic beauty as a transcendent value (what Chambers terms "fetish aesthetics") like his contemporaries Gautier and Nerval, Baudelaire evolved in these late works towards a new conception of "supernaturalism" that moved from the natural world and the sublime to the artificial city and its strident chaos. The "natural supernaturalism" that, according to M.H. Abrams, characterizes Romantic aesthetics is thus subverted into a paradoxical "urban supernaturalism." Historically, this turn in Baudelaire's poetics corresponds with the poet's disenchantment with politics, after the brutal crushing of the 1848 revolution and Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of 1852; it also coincides with Paris's increasing overpopulation and poverty, and with the dramatic destruction of old neighbour-hoods under Haussmann's modernization project. Ever present in Baudelaire's late verse and prose poems, noise is an overwhelming fact of daily urban life, which anchors the works in the harsh reality of the poet's time. Chambers reads time in Baudelaire's poetry on several interwoven levels: as the inner experience of ineluctable passing; as the continuous weight of violent historical events on that experience; and as absolute Evil, the destructive force of "le Mal," which Chambers strikingly equates with entropy. In Baudelaire's poems, he argues, subjective time and historical time are metaphorically interconnected with the weather, which, as scorching sun or violent storm, bears down on urban activities (notably on the flâneur's walks) and moods-a connection Chambers encapsulates in the phrase "the weather of time." Far from neutral, this connection is permeated with unease, [End Page 673] the diffuse sense that the everyday, though familiar, is strange and inscrutable. The inability to know what is familiar, precisely because it is familiar, a notion Chambers borrows from Hegel, saturates the atmosphere of the city: an alienating otherness lurks in the physical, emotional, and moral milieu that surrounds its inhabitants. In making the reader aware of this secret otherness, the poetics of noise, Chambers argues, has a disalienating effect. In the great poems of Tableaux parisiens written between 1859 and 1861, the agent of disalienation is allegory, a trope that, in itself, enacts otherness. Chambers offers complex readings of some of these enigmatic and often discussed poems, "Le Cygne," "Les sept vieillards," and "A une passante" in particular, and shows how specific formal disruptions function as poetic noise, unsettling our reading and alerting us to the limits of our understanding. In these poems, fleeting encounters with perturbing figures amongst the deafening din, disorder, or stormy weather of the city weave together noise, atmospheric phenomena, and emotional shock into a melancholic recognition that the "empty sky" leaves us at the mercy of the malevolent action of time and death, the downward movement of history. The prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris move from supernaturalism to irony. God's withdrawal from the world, Chambers argues, has abandoned it to an invisibly ironic and impenetrable immanence. Anonymity governs daily social relations. This "cruel but transparent irony that haunts the everyday" is made visible in the prose poems, in which seemingly transparent anecdotes of urban life turn ironically on to themselves, introducing interfering noise into interpretation. In "Perte d'auréole" and "Le Mauvais vitrier," for example, Chambers shows how, in the course of the poem, irony shifts undecidedly between the poet and the man he encounters (a fellow poet, a glazier), so that the lofty figure of the poet, and our reading assurance, end up lost in the gutter or shattered. Social distinctions are tumbled in a "poetics of anonymity." Chambers pays particular attention to the fact that...

Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature by Scott Powers

Reviewed by: Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature by Scott Powers Susanna Lee Scott Powers. Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016. 274pp. Scott Powers's Confronting Evil examines what the author calls the psychological dimension of secularization, focusing on the question of how authors negotiate encounters with evil, absent a belief in God and God's plan. Powers examines writers of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century [End Page 161] France as "various case studies of a modern psychology, born in the interstices of the rivaling cultural trends of religion and secularism" (5). Referencing Charles Taylor and Peter Berger in the book's Introduction, Powers posits secularization as an ongoing dialogue between a mental perspective that believes in a cosmic frame of reference and one that does not. Secularization appears in his readings as interwoven with grieving, as authors grapple with loss of faith on either a social or a personal level. At times, he casts this sense of loss in Freudian terms of libidinal investment and psychic reaction against self-incoherence. At others, he casts it as a performance, part of what he calls "the project of secularization." Chapter One examines Baudelaire's poetry and essays, situating signs of nostalgia for the "lost enchanted world." Powers also addresses the question of responsibility for evil, noting that for Baudelaire, the individual and God cannot both be exonerated. This chapter's best point is its analysis of "Mademoiselle Bistouri," which reads the titular woman as monster and priest and interprets its prayer as a questioning of God's existence. Because Powers describes both secularization and the modernity of writing as the "performance of mourning" (6), it is not clear whether he sees every secular mind as feeling the loss of the divine, or if the sense of mourning is a poetic effect. This ambiguity is underscored by the numerous turns to Freud and to the author's religious pasts. In this chapter as in all the others, secularism seems to be by turns syndrome and construct, a provocative duality that calls for much greater clarification. Chapter Two explores the correlation between irony and secularism in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris. Here, too, the focus alternates between the psychoanalytic—irony as coping mechanism—and the philosophical—secularization as demanding a continued dialogic relationship with the notion of God. Powers claims that for Baudelaire, "evil is affirmation and positivity," and that Spleen's tension between idealism and realism casts evil in a sociological perspective. Chapter Three studies Zola and Huysmans, the relationship between sublimation and conversion, and the emergence of the body as the ultimate signifier in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. In an analysis of Thérèse Raquin, Powers describes the naturalist text as needing to "cover the abyss" by transmuting it into images of transcendence. This notion calls for some further development, since in some sense the abyss as described here is a naturalist construct. In this chapter, as in the one that follows, the secular mind seems principally interested in finding its way back to religion. At the same time, in a reading of Huysmans's En route, the act of prayer is presented as a "veritable reinvestment [End Page 162] of the libido," which raises the question of how, if this is so, it can be so only for a secular mind. Chapter Four studies Zola and Huysmans's perspectives on physical suffering, comparing Zola's Lourdes to Huysmans's Les Foules de Lourdes. Lourdes, notes Powell, adopts the believer's perspective, while Huysmans wards off the loss of faith by casting Lourdes as a site of expiatory torment. Here too, the focus remains on secularism as a series of returns to faith, even as Powers finds in Foules a demonstration that "reaffirmation of belief in God involves the relentless process of self-convincing" (182). This chapter contains useful comparative close readings. Chapter Five, which analyzes Céline's medical perspectives on evil, reads Céline's "conversion" to anti-Semitism as a mechanism for coping with evil. This chapter takes a troubling turn. As Powers writes, "It seems helpful to understand Céline...

Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film by Andreas Huyssen

Reviewed by: Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film by Andreas Huyssen Adalberto Müller Andreas Huyssen. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. xiii + 346 pp. Since 2003’s Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen has been counted among the group of humanities scholars whose texts and ideas flourish naturally across the world thanks to the way they diffuse through many different fields of knowledge, from literature to media studies, architecture, and the visual arts. The reason for this adaptability and widespread interest is probably due to the way Huyssen’s essays reflect a shift in German scholarship since the mid-1920s, when modernist thinkers and writers such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno developed a new approach to understanding culture. Instead of focusing just on specific objects—as science often does—they started to create a kaleidoscopic view grasping multiple objects, including novels, films, architecture, music, and even everyday phenomena such as street signs or tiller girl dances. In doing so, their attitude resembles that of Joseph Knecht, a character from Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. The game Knecht mastered was connecting different arts with fields of knowledge, such as music and physics, in order to attain a broader understanding of existence. Unlike Hesse’s character, however, who is in search of a transcendental meaning for life, these scholars would dive deeper into the dark waters of the cultural and technological aspects of late capitalist societies. Having read their works, Huyssen, a German scholar who has lived in the US for many years, is somehow affiliated with them. The reason for this resemblance is no coincidence, however, but is rather an intentional movement toward a reinterpretation of high modernity after the waning of postmodernist theories that exploded in the humanities during the early 1980s. Miniature Metropolis’s subtitle, “Literature in an Age of Photography and Film,” is seemingly a reference to Benjamin’s famous essay [End Page 181] on technical reproduction. Huyssen includes writers, philosophers, and artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Benjamin, Adorno, Hannah Höch, and Irmgard Keun, among others. Huyssen does not consider their works in general but rather dissects some works he calls miniatures, a genre of short prose texts on urban life created by Baudelaire in Le Spleen de Paris and practiced by German language writers in the first half of the twentieth century. In his book, Huyssen clearly demonstrates that this is probably a key genre within high modernity for two reasons: first, in their miniatures modernists were searching for a “reverse remediation” for technical media such as film and photography, influenced by these new possibilities of grasping the world (7), and second, due to their agile and protean form, miniatures had a tendency toward interpenetration (Durchdringung, a concept created by Siegfried Giedion that Huyssen often employs) with urban life in the metropolis. Miniatures could describe the city’s movements in its own terms much more than conventional genres such as novels and poems. In other words, Huyssen is arguing that this “minor literature”—a term he uses in accordance with the Deleuzian concept—is a privileged standpoint of life in the metropolis (9). To accept this challenging idea, we must first understand what is at stake when Huyssen assembles so many different texts, including Benjamin’s philosophical fragments in One Way Street, Musil’s reflections from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and Adorno’s microessays from Minima Moralia. What they all have in common, according to Huyssen, is not only their brevity but the way they remediate optical media such as film and photography into a new literary form in order to describe life in the metropolis. Miniatures are like literary silent movies or poetic snapshots composed exclusively of words. This is why Huyssen is right to call it reverse remediation, since Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept seems more appropriate to describe how prior media such as the novel can be remediated by later media such as cinema, television, the internet, and so on. Therefore, on one hand, miniatures are produced as a result of the awareness that modern authors like Kafka...

The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation

The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media by Marit Grøtta

Reviewed by: Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media by Marit Grøtta Aimée Boutin Marit Grøtta. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 216 pp. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics invites us to look back at Charles Baudelaire’s writings through the specificity and historicity of new technologies of vision rather than with the naked eye alone. Norwegian scholar Marit Grøtta argues that Baudelaire was not only taken with the cult of images of his era; rather, he reflected on the act of “seeing, framing, and interpreting [End Page 143] images” and responded to a new perceptual regime (8). The book analyses a thought-provoking combination of media—ranging from newspapers and photographs to optical toys and pre-cinematic devices, such as the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, the stereoscope, the panorama, and the phantasmagoria—to study similarities between Baudelaire’s encounters with different media and assess how media played a role in shaping his idea of modernity. The eye-catching cover design by Eleanor Rose based on a phenakistiscope disk does an excellent job of conveying the significance of media and movement to this study. In her Introduction, Grøtta carefully builds a solid theoretical framework one block at a time. The entire book is clearly argued and logically presented. In line with the recent upswing in interest in Le Spleen de Paris, Grøtta’s analysis focuses on the prose poems rather than Les Fleurs du mal. As a work of visual studies, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics builds on the scholarship of Tom Gunning and Jonathan Crary for whom “the gaze of the flâneur” signaled in the book’s subtitle is a shorthand for the mediated gaze of the mobile spectator of the big modern city. The argument’s two main anchors are Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, who provide the essential theoretical tools to build on the four main concepts Grøtta deploys: movement, montage, mediation, and play. The first chapter focuses on newspapers, which are laid out using the principle of montage, and require a new kind of reader equipped to deal with fragmentation and speed. Newspapers shape visual experience, thus producing a new kind of visibility (33). Chapter one builds on critical discourse on nineteenth-century French literature and the press, and more specifically on Baudelaire’s relationship to the newspaper to argue that the poet’s vision of urban life was mediated through the newspaper. The combination of anecdote and allegory in his poems also creates tension between different modes of reading that suggest the influence of the newspaper on his aesthetics (39). The second chapter on photographs takes a fresh path down a well-traveled road in Baudelairean studies; most recently Françoise Meltzer in Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago, 2011) and Tim Raser in Baudelaire and Photography: Finding the Painter of Modern Life (Legenda 2015) have written about the poet and art critic’s visual aesthetic and his condemnation of photography in the Salon de 1859. Though well known, Baudelaire’s attack on photography does not tell the whole story; chapter two reconsiders the use of photographic images in three prose poems (“Les Fenêtres,” “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” and “Le Joueur généreux”) that draw [End Page 144] on the camera’s gaze and framing. Grøtta examines the framed view in “Les Fenêtres” in terms of the “dispositive” of photograph and caption, meaning that she reads the “window-image” of the woman in “Les Fenêtres” and the poet’s writings or literalization of the image as corresponding to a photograph and its caption. After an analysis of the violence of photography in “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” Grøtta turns her attention to the traffic in souls as trade or circulation in/of images and carte de visite photography in “Le Joueur généreux.” As a “poet in the age of technological reproducibility” (71), Baudelaire is interested not only in photography’s ability to arrest images but also to put them into circulation. In this way, argues Grøtta, Baudelaire “battle[s] the passive consumption of images encouraged by the...

An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers

la vision de près et de loin, la multifocalité qui en reposant sur un partage de la lumière donne une vision floue à chaque foyer mais précise sur une plus grande plage de distance, ou encore le zoom, cet objectif à focale variable qui permet des effets d’éloignement et de rapprochement. Le regard du lecteur, sa distance par rapport au temps et à l’espace ainsi que sa position idéologique, agit comme vecteur de l’appréhension du texte équivalent au procès pictural. En fin de compte, ces essais captivants qui adoptent chacun un angle de vue différent démontrent que ce serait une erreur de choisir entre la lecture de près qui ne serait que celle du détail et la lecture de loin que celle de la généralité; il ne s’agit pas de les opposer, “chacune articule les deux, dans un sens, dans un ordre, dans une mesure différente” (83). Fairfield University (CT) Marie-Agnès Sourieau Chambers, Ross. An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8232-6584-8. Pp. xiii + 187. $35. In this excellent book, Chambers traces Baudelaire’s evolution, following the calamitous and disillusioning events of 1848–51 and the advent of the Second Empire, from a fetishizing aesthetic that counters ugliness, beautifies the ordinary, and acts as a negentropic element through the power of form, to a“poetics of the antipoetic”(23), a poetics accommodating and incorporating the disorder of the street and the world, a poetics of noise. For his demonstration, Chambers focuses on a number of poems drawn mainly from “Tableaux parisiens” and Le spleen de Paris. “Je n’ai pas oublié,” for example, shows not only Baudelaire’s formal mastery but also seeds of his dissatisfaction with fetishizing art and its illusionism.“Paysage” and “Le soleil” point to the abandoning of idealizing poetry. “Le cygne,” “Les sept vieillards,” “À une passante” evoke the life and crowdedness of cities, express the corrosive powers of time, and institute a dynamics of disalienating beauty.“Perte d’auréole,” in which the poet abandons his aura and effaces himself, and “Le mauvais vitrier,” which lays out the stages of Baudelaire’s aesthetic transformation, develop a noise-friendly poetics. Chambers’s readings are rich, precise, persuasive, and so are his remarks on such matters as allegory, the tension between supernaturalism and irony in Baudelaire, the poet’s attitude toward sculpture, or rhyme and its mediation of difference. Most interesting, perhaps, is Chambers’s discussion of the Petits poèmes en prose, which he views as having invented, inadvertently, a new genre: the urban diary. An Atmospherics of the City illuminates the very nature of modern art, an art that assimilates non-art or anti-art, and it draws a memorable portrait of an exemplarily modern Baudelaire. Modern and maybe postmodern, as Chambers emphasizes the perplexing undecidabilities in the poet’s work, his denial of human progress, and his belief that, ultimately, humans cannot know the truth, his move toward a “lowercase practice of the poetic” 256 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 257 (135), his refusal of totalization and completion. Chambers’s text constitutes a splendid achievement. University of Pennsylvania Gerald Prince Chouiten, Lynda. Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa: A Carnivalesque Mirage. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. ISBN 978-0-7391-8592-6. Pp. 217. $85. At first glance, the life of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) seems to exemplify the subversive potential of nomadism and hybridity. The Swiss-born child of Russian and Armenian parents, Eberhardt traveled to Algeria, converted to Islam, wore men’s clothing, and married an Arab. But read closely, her diaries, letters, and fiction present a somewhat different figure. In her study of Eberhardt’s life and works, Chouiten argues that rather than subvert Orientalist understandings of race and gender, Eberhardt leveraged unconventional strategies—cross-dressing and religious conversion—to occupy a position of power from which to espouse a conventional worldview that supported the colonial project. While biographies of Eberhardt have tended to focus on her diaries and letters, Chouiten pays particular attention to her fiction as a way of plotting the author’s...

Le spleen de Paris , un Paris pour collectionneur?

In Le Spleen de Paris (1855-1865), Baudelaire not only paints the capital of France from a scenic point of view, referring to well-known places and typical characters, but also by echoing the voices of many Parisian people. He does so without expressing any judgment about the ideology their discourses convey. In this way, the imaginary Paris of Baudelaire seems to be incoherent and cacophonous, just like the modern capitalist world in which the poet is condemned to live, looking at it like a spectator or a witness, without understanding it. It is this detached attitude that defines Baudelaire’s modernity.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Baudelaire’s Modernité

The concept of modernity remains a crux for literary studies because it attempts to combine historical categories with principles of form. Modernity refers to a moment of change: change in history and change in aesthetic forms indissociable from it. This essay examines the privileged case of Baudelaire, where a reflection on modernity—“Le Peintre de la vie moderne”—is doubled by writings regularly taken as examples of modernity—especially Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris . Is it possible to identify the formal element in Baudelaire’s writing that distinguishes it as “modern”? After juxtaposing the incompatible responses offered by Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin, the essay considers “Le Thyrse” as a particular case in point. The reading discloses how only a radically “prosaic” element—though one equally at work in the verse and prose poetry—could prove adequate to a “modernity” at one and the same time poetic and historical.