Introduction, by Michael W. Jennings Baudelaire Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire Central Park On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Notes Index
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis. Michael W. Jennings is Professor of German, Princeton University. Howard Eiland teaches literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rodney Livingstone is Professor Emeritus in German Studies at the University of Southampton. He is well known as a translator of books by Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Weber, among others.
In these essays, written in the 1930s, German critic Benjamin
masterfully succeeds in changing our perception of French poet
Charles Baudelaire as a late Romantic dreamer. Instead, he shows
Baudelaire to be a thoroughly modern writer involved in a
life-and-death struggle with that urban commodity, capitalism,
which had begun to emerge in Paris in the 1850s. Benjamin portrays
Baudelaire as a flaneur--a stroller who roamed the lonely Paris
streets lost in the faceless crowd--as well as a lone modern hero
searching for a means of selling his poetry. In the urban crowds,
all traces of individuality are erased, and Baudelaire's famed
"spleen" is actually disgust at that defining aspect of the modern
condition. Indeed, in "The Painter of Modern Life," an essay
Baudelaire wrote in 1863, he makes several acute observations about
his sense of alienation that definitely establish him as a modern
writer. Stimulating reading.
*Library Journal*
Brilliant essays.
*The Nation*
It's depressing to be a critic within a hundred years of Benjamin:
he got there first on so many things. The poet Charles Baudelaire
died twenty-five years before Benjamin was born, in 1892, but
Benjamin writes about him as if they were there together in
nineteen-twenties Berlin, making a ruckus. For Benjamin, Baudelaire
represented 'the modern.' That doesn't mean that he claims
Baudelaire wrote 'about' modernity but that his poetry embodies it.
For example, Benjamin notes the influence on Baudelaire of new
technologies such as photography, and writes that 'Baudelaire was
his own impresario,' an artist who knew that his poems were
commodities even before they were done.
*New Yorker*
Now comes The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire,
edited by Princeton University professor Michael Jennings, and
based on the writings of Walter Benjamin, a long dead German
genius. Benjamin dissects the author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The
Flowers of Evil) with a Marxist scalpel, among other unusual
literary procedures. Why is all this happening? Maybe because in a
unique way we fearful and confused souls recognize that
Baudelaire's mordant and yet often exquisitely beautiful poetry and
screwed-up life are a kind of mirror noir of our own teetering
times. The same violent deaths, political treacheries, religious
confrontations--and yet brief Roman candle bursts of loveliness are
there.
*Washington Times*
This is an excellent collection of essays by one of the greatest
critics of the first half of the 20th century about one of the
greatest poets of the 19th century. In presenting Baudelaire in
these landmark studies, Benjamin situates the first truly modern
poet against the backdrop of the first truly modern city. From wide
brushstrokes about the figure of the flaneur to close readings of
specific poems, Benjamin's acumen makes clear that he was that rare
breed of critic who could deftly weave the macro and the micro in
seamless discussions.
*Choice*
This is an excellent collection of essays by one of the greatest
critics of the first half of the 20th century about one of the
greatest poets of the 19th century. In presenting Baudelaire in
these landmark studies, Benjamin situates the first truly modern
poet against the backdrop of the first truly modern city. From wide
brushstrokes about the figure of the flaneur to close readings of
specific poems, Benjamin's acumen makes clear that he was that rare
breed of critic who could deftly weave the macro and the micro in
seamless discussions...Jennings' supporting critical apparatus,
complete with useful notes at every turn, frames these important
texts in a way that reveals not only Benjamin and Baudelaire but
also the intersections of modernity, poetry, history, urbanism, and
many other fields.
*Choice*
Benjamin planned to write a book on Baudelaire, but it never
materialized. With the exception of 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,'
which appeared in a journal edited by Max Horkheimer and Adorno in
1939, his Baudelaire essays were published posthumously. In the
past thirty years, some of them have surfaced in English
translations, but all of them have now been retranslated and
brought together in a single volume entitled The Writer of Modern
Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, complete with a valuable
introduction and notes by Michael W. Jennings.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Benjamin's work continues to fascinate and delight because it has
something for everyone: the literary critic, art historian,
philosopher, urban theorist and architect. Whether he is talking
about children's toys, Mickey Mouse, Surrealism, photography, or
Kafka, Benjamin has a knack for figuring out what they can tell us
about the wider world that produced them.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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