Formal Revolution In The Work Of Baudelaire And Flaubert

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.

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.

In 1857 the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire for offending against religion and public morality drew attention to the features we now associate with literary modernism; but instead of winning praise for their innovations they were indicted for "ideological crimes." With the passage of time the offenses have been forgotten and the innovations inserted into a triumphal narrative about the rise of modernism. Far from manifesting the autonomy proclaimed by modernism's defenders, though, Flaubert's and Baudelaire's works remain enmeshed in their socio-historical contexts. To that end, The Censorship Effect argues that the stylistic features that prompted the criminal indictment of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal--Flaubert's free indirect style and Baudelaire's multiple poetic personae--were much more the products of an intense struggle with a culture of censorship than they were hallmarks of autonomous or autoreferential works of art. They exhibit signs of self-censorship and collaboration with a regime of ethical and political censorship that not only shaped their very composition but affected their reception and continues to operate in the field of literary criticism. Indeed, as William Olmsted compellingly demonstrates, French modernism begins and remains deeply embedded in a culture of censorship whose proprieties, both literary and social, Baudelaire and Flaubert nevertheless challenged and transgressed. Exploring the censorship effect as it played out for Baudelaire and Flaubert, from their trials to their monuments, The Censorship Effect recaptures some sense of their original anger as well as its ongoing suppression by new orthodoxies and reveals how the effect of censorship has implications beyond Flaubert and Baudelaire, beyond authors, but for us as readers too.

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.

A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse (Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil]) and prose poems (Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen]). This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and offer compelling and fraught representations of urban expansion, social change, and modernity. Part 1, "Materials," surveys the valuable resources available for teaching Baudelaire, including editions and translations of his oeuvre, historical accounts of his life and writing, scholarly works, and online databases. In Part 2, "Approaches," experienced instructors present strategies for teaching critical debates on Baudelaire's prose poems, addressing topics such as translation theory, literary genre, alterity, poetics, narrative theory, and ethics as well as the shifting social, economic, and political terrain of the nineteenth century in France and beyond. The essays offer interdisciplinary connections and outline traditional and fresh approaches for teaching Baudelaire's prose poems in a wide range of classroom contexts.

Inventing Agency addresses some of the most central and pressing concerns in criticism, theory, and philosophy today. As new metaphysics of the realia of power and independently animated objects have replaced ancient conceptualizations of substance, being, and causation, the question of the “subject”-of the capability for just such conceptual change, for acting to any effect whatsoever-has reemerged with fresh critical urgency. Writing on theories and fictions of the subject from Aristotle to Althusser and Fielding to Flaubert, the contributors to Inventing Agency explore the unprecedented productions of the subject as agent-of cognition, aesthetic experience and judgment, imagination and representation, and moral and political action-that together define the “revolution” in reflection that Kant called “the Age of Critique.” Informed by expertise in such interrelated fields as continental and analytic philosophy and literary history, Marxian and utopian theory, poetics and cultural criticism, moral theory and theory of sensibility, and feminist and disability studies, Inventing Agency addresses the invention of subjecthood by philosophical and literary conceptions of the specifically human capacities that continue to reveal the prospect of social-individual and historical-agency in action. This collection on the productions of the subject is vital reading for anyone engaged in thinking about where the categories of contemporary theory come from, and where they might lead next.

A study of novelty through analyses of the language of announcement in revolutionary texts. Walter Benjamin claimed that the notion of novelty took on unprecedented importance with the growth of high capitalism in the nineteenth century. In this book, Kristina Mendicino analyzes a selection of canonical texts that reflect profound concern with novelty and its apparent contrary, the eternal return of the same, including Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Baudelaire’s lyric and prose poetry, and Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. She also addresses Eternity by the Stars by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who is less well known and often underestimated in considerations of his significance for revolutionary political theory. Mendicino argues that the notion of a novum cannot be understood without attentiveness to the language of announcement, not least of all because the “new” has always been associated with a particular mode of linguistic performance. Through close readings of emphatically annunciatory texts, she demonstrates how the extreme possibilities of expression that they present through specific citational and rhetorical praxes render the language of announcement overdetermined and anachronistic in ways that exceed any systematic account of historical time and experience. This excess in and through language is precisely what opens hitherto unheard of alternatives for conceiving of historical temporality and political possibility. “Impressive in scope and philosophically sophisticated, this erudite and elegantly written book is, quite simply, dazzling. Mendicino successfully tears down many of the tired clichés that too often subtend discussions about novelty and modernism and makes persuasive arguments for her own novel claims about why the appeal to novelty matters so much. In her capable hands, the question of novelty becomes a lever with which she powerfully pries open familiar texts, philosophical traditions, and concepts and transforms those recognizable topoi into resources for thinking differently about historical time, revolution, capital, wealth, theory, and practice.” — Elissa Marder, author of Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert)

Quand la folie parle presents a timely reinvigoration of the complex subject of madness and its literary manifestations. This stimulating study, authored by a range of young and talented international scholars, is of key importance in defining and refining our ongoing endeavours to theorise and analyse the literary representations of the problematics of mental health. By including discussions of texts that speak of madness as well as those that speak from madness, this volume demonstrates that, in fact, the non-sense of madness achieves a force of expression often more powerful than the usual order of logic. Embracing the scientific, the religious, the medical, the psychoanalytic, the historical, the erotic, and, of course, the properly literary, this wide-ranging, historically-informed collection is particularly significant in its exploration of both the “madwoman” and the “madman,” and exhibits an inclusiveness which extends to the genres and modes of the texts examined. The authors discussed, from Nerval and Houellebecq to NDiaye and Lê, provide a refreshingly “balanced” picture of mental illness, presenting madness or depression as a contestatory, creative stance against often mind-numbing social, racial or consumerist conventions, while refusing to play down the inevitable difficulties accompanying this isolating condition. The “dialectic effect” referenced in the title of the collection extends not only to the dynamics at work within the volume itself, as the different contributions implicitly dialogue with one another, but equally to the reader of these essays, who is engaged throughout in the debates put forward.