Vers, vermines, vermisseaux et autres bestioles contaminantes dans l'œuvre poétique de Charles Baudelaire

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-155
Author(s):  
Dominique Rincé
Keyword(s):  
Organic Matter ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
The Self ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
Spleen De Paris ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal

Baudelaire's bestiary is well known for its large birds loaded with symbols (thinking owls, lost swans, or splenetic albatrosses), his good dogs or wriggling doggies, and especially his cats, all imbued with a mysterious and fascinating felinity. What is less known, however, is the small creeping fauna that seems to have taken up residence in Baudelaire's poems, to infest them and vivify them at the same time. Worms, vermin, wormlings, but also flies, bugs, spiders, ants, pupae, and other unusual ‘helminths’ swarm and proliferate in the alveoli of the homonymous ‘vers’ since it is rather in those of the Fleurs du mal, more than in the prose of the Spleen de Paris (in spite of the reptilian dedication to Arsene Houssaye), that this infectious and contaminating swarming seems to happen. After a quick inventory of this poisonous micro bestiary, this article aims to reveal its symbolic and, above all, poetic significance, if we consider that Memento mori such as ‘Une charogne’ or ‘Le Flacon’ are also authentic poetic arts in which the oxymoric work of decomposition / recreation carried by these ‘infamous’ little creatures takes place. ‘From the vaporization and centralization of the Self. All is there’, says the first fragment of Mon cœur mis à nu. There is nothing like some ‘black battalions of larvae’ to perform this paradigmatic reversal of the putrefied and pulverized organic matter to the reconfigured and sublimated poetics.

Baudelaire, Charles (1821–67)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emile De Rosnay
Keyword(s):  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Petits Poemes En Prose ◽  
Aesthetic Modernity ◽  
Spleen De Paris ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal

Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal figure of modernist aesthetics. His contributions to poetry, the prose poem and criticism, as well as his focus on urban modernity and the psychological consequences of industrialization, have had an undeniable impact on modernism. He is amongst the first to have connected historical modernity to aesthetic modernity, in works such as Les Fleurs du mal, Spleen de Paris (Petits poèmes en prose), and Le Peintre de la vie moderne.

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

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
SONYA STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spleen De Paris ◽  
The Relationship

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.

scholarly journals Le Spleen de Paris de Charles Baudelaire : des « petits genres journalistiques » aux « petits poèmes en prose »

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Michel Gouvard
Keyword(s):  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Petits Poemes En Prose ◽  
Spleen De Paris

Les petits poèmes en prose réunis dans Le Spleen de Paris ont été composés à la toute fin des années 1850 et dans la première moitié des années 1860, une période où la presse connaît un réel essor et une profonde transformation. De plus, ces textes ont été pour la plupart d’entre eux publiés dans des revues et des journaux. Or, il est possible de montrer qu’il y a eu une double influence de la presse sur la genèse des petits poèmes en prose. D’un côté, les conditions matérielles dans lesquelles travaillaient les journalistes se reflètent pour partie dans la thématique du recueil, dans la mesure où Baudelaire y puisait des représentations propres à nourrir sa réflexion sur le statut du poète et de la poésie dans la société moderne. D’un autre côté, les pratiques d’écriture et les contraintes génériques des différents genres journalistiques se retrouvent en partie dans les poèmes du Spleen de Paris, même si l’on ne saurait réduire ces textes à des articles de journaux.

‘Ordre et beauté’

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-436
Author(s):  
Michael Downe
Keyword(s):  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Musical Time ◽  
Instrumental Works ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal

The British composer Jonathan Harvey is generally associated with Eastern sacred texts rather than the secular Western literary canon. However, evidence from works composed over several decades suggests that Charles Baudelaire was a significant if subterranean influence upon his music. This article considers these works in detail. ‘L’Horloge’ [‘The Clock’] (1963) is a remarkable interpretation of Baudelaire’s text which reveals in it parallels with Harvey’s own contemporary preoccupations with the nature of musical time. Correspondances (1975) is a sequence of settings from Les Fleurs du mal and interludes and ‘fragments’ for piano which may be arranged in numerous orders at the discretion of the performers. Finally, the instrumental works Hidden Voice (1996) and Hidden Voice II (1999) demonstrate that the poet’s ideas remained an inspiration to Harvey well into his compositional maturity. Particularly striking is the variety and originality of these musical responses. Baudelaire’s real significance for Harvey was perhaps as an exemplar of aesthetic ideals - of ‘order and beauty’ - rather than merely as a source of musically suggestive images and phrases.

scholarly journals 'Memento mori Froberger?' Locating the self in the passage of time

Early Music ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Cypess
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Memento Mori

The Gospel According to Hanoch

1988 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-154
Author(s):  
Shimon Levy
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
The Self ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Genesis 22 ◽  
Six Day War

Hanoch Levin, born 1943, is one of Israel's best known and most widely performed playwrights, and the author of some 20 strikingly morbid plays (as well as numerous short stories and many beautiful lyrics). Levin's drama has proved to be both an artistic and a commercial success. His political cabaret shows You, I and the Next War (1968) and Queen of the Bathtub (1970), ridiculed the self-righteous complacency of Israeli society after the overwhelming victory of the Six Day War in 1967. Levin, like the slave in triumphal processions of ancient Rome, stood behind hubrisridden Israel, whispering ‘memento mori’, and so, quite naturally, caused a local scandal. Levin mocks highly esteemed army generals, and he uses (or abuses) the sacred myth of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac, when he is about to be offered as a sacrifice by Abraham (Genesis 22): ‘Dear father, when you stand by my grave … do not be too proud … and ask me to forgive you’, says dead Isaac, a ‘live’ metaphor for the blood spilt in vain, in Levin's sacrilegious version. The Israeli censor found it necessary to ban The Patriot (1983), a reaction to the stupidity and futility of the Lebanon War, until some modifications were entered.

scholarly journals Fiction as a Medium of Social Communication in 19th Century France

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Sabina Pstrocki-Sehovic ◽  
Sabina Pstrocki-Sehovic
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Emile Zola ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Comedie Humaine ◽  
19Th Century France ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal

This article will present the extent to which literature could be viewed as means of social communication – i.e. informing and influencing society – in 19thcentury France, by analysing the appearance of three authors at different points:  the beginning, the middle and the end of the century. The first is the case of Balzac at the beginning of the 19th Century who becomes the most successful novelist of the century in France and who, in his prolific expression and rich vocabulary, portrays society from various angles in a huge opus of almost 100 works, 93 of them making his Comédie humaine. The second is the case of Gustave Flaubert whose famous novel Madame Bovary, which depicts a female character in a realist but also in a psychologically conscious manner, around the mid-19th century reaches French courts together with Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire and is exposed as being socially judged for its alleged immorality. The last is the political affair of Dreyfus and its defender Emile Zola, the father of naturalism. This case confirms the establishment of more intense relations between writer and politics and builds a solid way for a more conscious and everyday political engagement in the literary world from the end of the 19th century onwards. These three are the most important cases which illustrate how fiction functioned in relation to society, state and readership in 19th century France.

scholarly journals A forma de uma cidade: O Spleen de Paris

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-97
Author(s):  
Inês Oseki-Dépré
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Spleen De Paris

Resumo Em 1999, o poeta francês Jacques Roubaud publica uma antologia cujo título remete a um poema de Baudelaire. Trata-se da antologia La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains, conjunto de 50 poemas em prosa escritos entre 1991 e 1998 sobre a cidade de Paris. Trata-se aqui mais do que uma homenagem, hipertextual, ao poema de Baudelaire e, em seguida, à sua invenção revolucionária, emblema da modernidade, o poema em prosa. Utilizando a forma inaugurada por Charles Baudelaire, Roubaud confirma o que já afirmara em 1978 em seus estudos teóricos e críticos sobre o verso e a poesia e a extensão resultante do domínio da poesia. O presente artigo tem como objetivo mostrar a suprema novidade que representa o poema em prosa baudelairiano, incompreendido no seu tempo, mas já apreciado por poetas e críticos cuja opinião varia com o passar dos séculos: de texto “sem pé nem cabeça” (em francês “sans queue ni tête”), como o pretende o próprio autor, até o texto metacrítico contendo sua própria teoria, emblemático da modernidade e cuja repercussão permanece até hoje. As análises formais da pesquisadora americana Barbara Johnson completam admiravelmente a reflexão exaustiva e penetrante de Walter Benjamin sobre as relações entre o poeta, a cidade de Paris, o mundo moderno industrial.

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