Experimental feature: Order The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.

               

Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 841.8
EAN: 9780674022874
ISBN: 0674022874
Label: Belknap Press
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2006-11-15
Publisher: Belknap Press
Studio: Belknap Press

Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

(20060915)

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Benjamin On Baudelaire
Review: It is difficult to review a book that, however important, one disagrees with so profoundly. Walter Benjamin, an early 20th century (between WWI and WWII) German socialist, is justifiably considered one of the most influential critics of Baudelaire. But reading his essays with an open mind (honest!), all I could think of was how silly those old-time, Marxist and Freudian notions appeared to me, and how little they illuminated Baudelaire's poetry for a 21st-century reader.

On the good side, Michael Jennings' editorship is superb: the best modern scholar of Benjamin, he's given us an excellent redaction of Benjamin's German text into modern English, with fine and clear translations by several authors and a complete and illuminating 80 pages worth of notes.

Anyone who really loves poetry should avoid, at any cost, contaminating their minds with 20th century lit crit. But if, for whatever reason, you can't help yourself, and you absolutely must have an English translation of Walter Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire, then this is the edition to get!

---

---