Baudelaire Et Freud

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Publisher Description

Maria Scott's study of the operation of irony in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris contends that the principal target of the collection's spleen is its own readership. Baudelaire, as one of the most perceptive cultural commentators of the nineteenth century, was naturally very keenly aware of the growing dominance of the bourgeoisie in France, not least as a market for art and literature. Despite being dependent on this market for his own writing, the poet was highly critical of bourgeois values and attitudes. Scott builds on existing criticism of the collection to argue that these are indirectly mocked in Le Spleen de Paris, often in the person of the poet's supposed textual alter ego. The contention is that the prose poems betray the trust of readers by way of an apparent transparency of meaning that functions to blind us to their embedded irony. Though focused on Le Spleen de Paris, Scott's study engages with the full range of Baudelaire's writings, including his art and literary criticism. Her book will be of interest not only to Baudelaire scholars but also to those engaged more generally with nineteenth-century French culture.

El presente ensayo emprende un acercamiento psicoanal tico a la obra de Baudelaire, quien ha desconcertado a m s de un cr tico debido al cr ptico simbolismo que encierra su producci n l rica.

Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire's collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire's poetic prose are the poems' themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry's discourse are similarly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire's poetic language, beyond the discursive: in the poems' formal considerations, which retain recognisable traces of verse despite their prose presentation; and, with respect to both poetic form and thematics, in the sights and sounds that contribute to their poeticity. With a focus on what makes prose texts poetic, this study sheds light on Baudelaire the practitioner of the prose poem, as he navigated and complicated the boundaries between verse, prose, and poetry. Rather than rejecting those categories, Baudelaire forges a poetic space in which the notions of poetry and prose are recast, juxtaposed in a delicate balance in a textual space they manage to share. This coexistence of poetry and prose—previously thought of as incompatible—is the underlying tension and framework that contributes importantly to the modernity of his prose poetry. In turn, this new mode of poetry calls for new modes of reading poetry and new ways of engaging with a text.

In Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, Kathryn Oliver Mills argues that despite the enduring celebrity of Baudelaire and Flaubert, their significance to modern art has been miscast and misunderstood. To date, literary criticism has paid insufficient attention to these authors' literary form and their socio-cultural context. In addition, critical literature has not always adequately integrated individual works to each author’s broader oeuvre: on the one hand critics do not often maintain rigorous distinctions among texts when discussing Baudelaire and Flaubert, and on the other hand scholars of Baudelaire and Flaubert have not consistently considered the relationship of individual texts to either writer’s corpus. Furthermore, critical focus has been on the modernity of Les Fleurs du mal, Madame Bovary, and L'Education Sentimentale. Addressing these lacunae in scholarship, Mills puts forth the argument that Baudelaire's collection of prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris, and Flaubert's short, poetic tales, Trois contes, best embody the modern aesthetic that Baudelaire develops in Le Peintre de la vie moderne and that Flaubert elaborates in his correspondence. Formal Revolution places these relatively less well-known but last published works in relationship with the artistic goals of their authors, showing that Baudelaire and Flaubert were both acutely aware of the need to launch a new form of literature in order to literally “come to terms with” the dramatic changes transforming the nineteenth-century into the Modern Age. More specifically, Formal Revolution demonstrates that for Baudelaire and Flaubert the formal project of fusing prose with poetry—as poetic prose in the case of Flaubert, as poetry in prose in the case of Baudelaire—was crucial to their mission of “painting modern life.” This work concludes that experimentation with literary form represents these two seminal writers’ major legacy to modernity; suggests that the twentieth-century might have gone too far down that road; and speculates about the future direction of literature. The modernity of Baudelaire and Flaubert, still relevant today but often taken for granted, needs to be reexamined in light of the cultural, formal, and contextual considerations that inform Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert.

This 1993 reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris is a response to Baudelaire's own challenge to read his text as one in which 'everything ... is head and tail, alternately and reciprocally'. Margery Evans proposes that Le Spleen de Paris serves to question the conventions of prose forms such as the unitary narrator, the extended plot, and the artifice of beginnings and endings. She shows how Baudelaire's text probes the relationship between individuality and conformity to pre-existing codes, both in literature and in the world, and how the giant metropolis provides a symbol of that drama. Dr Evans explores the interconnections between the prose poems which make up Le Spleen de Paris and their intertextual relations with other, mostly prose, works, and argues that this anomalous, hybrid work raises far-reaching questions of relevance to narratology and to literary theory as a whole.