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Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics
The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media
E-Book: 200 English Pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Price: Free
DOWNLOAD: Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media (.
Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics situates Charles Baudelaire in the midst of 19th-century media culture. It offers a thorough study of the role of newspapers, photography, and precinematic devices in Baudelaire’s writings, while also discussing the cultural history of these media generally. The book reveals that Baudelaire was not merely inspired by the new media, but that he played with them, using them as frames of perception and ways of experiencing the world. His writings demonstrate how different media respond to one another and how the conventions of one medium can be paraphrased in another medium. Accordingly, Baudelaire’s Media Aestheticsargues that Baudelaire should be seen merely as an advocate of “pure poetry,” but as a poet in a media saturated environment. It shows that mediation, montage, and movement are features that are central to Baudelaire’s aesthetics and that his modernist aesthetics can be conceived of, to a large degree, as a media aesthetics.
Highlighting Baudelaire’s interaction with the media of his age, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics discusses the ways in which we respond to new media technology, drawing on perspectives from Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. Combining detailed research with contemporary theory, the book opens up new perspectives on Baudelaire’s writings, the figure of the flâneur, and modernist aesthetics.
Review
“Grøtta’s Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics is a highly topical, trans-disciplinary exploration of Baudelaire’s writings in the wider context of the evolution of text- and image-based media, from newspapers to photography and pre-cinematic technologies, in nineteenth-century France. Innovatively bringing together literary and visual culture studies, and drawing on theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, Grøtta’s discussion sheds new light not only on Baudelaire’s writings, but also on the figure of the flâneur, mediated viewing and mobile perception, among other topics in media and cultural studies.”
―Kathrin Yacavone, Assistant Professor of French, University of Nottingham, UK
“By reading Baudelaire’s relation to various 19th century media, including newspapers, painting, photography, and optical toys such as kaleidoscopes, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics offers a compelling alternative to Walter Benjamin’s influential account of his poetry and aesthetics and advances our understanding of the emergence of a new media world out of its 19th century beginnings.”
―Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative
“Marit Grøtta’s book brings a renewed view to the prose poetry of Baudelaire by exploring his immersion in the new print and visual media environment of his time. Balancing a literary approach to prose poetry with a conceptualization of media as living environment and technical forms of mediation, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics sheds new light on the modern “optical unconscious”and develops an original interpretive frame to read Walter Benjamin via Baudelaire, rather than the other way around. With astute links between the works of Marx, Freud, and Benjamin, Grøtta offers a fresh portrait of the flâneur, which she also enriches with her analyses of the divergent views on modern media by Giorgio Agamben and Bruno Latour.”
―Catherine Nesci, Chair of Comparative Literature, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA, and author of Le Flâneur et les flâneuses (2007)
“Although Baudelaire in 1859 famously denounced photography as sterile technology aiming to reproduce reality at the expense of artistic beauty, his writing was in fact framed, fashioned, and mediated through the new visual media of the period. In this rich multidisciplinary study, Grøtta argues that Baudelaire’s poetic sensibility can be fully understood only in the context of the media-saturated environment in which it took shape … Drawing on careful analysis of Baudelaire’s prose poems and theories of writers as different as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Agamben, Grøtta skillfully brings to light Baudelaire’s complex relationship with the rapidly developing text and image-based media of the 19th century … Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.”
–C. B. Kerr, Vassar College, CHOICE
“Grøtta is as comfortable dissecting four lines of a Baudelaire prose poem as she is discerning broad shifts in critical approaches to media. … The book offers unfailingly interesting micro-histories of the various dispositives under scrutiny, and the debate that emerges is always inclusive and informed. … [T]he contention that Baudelaire’s writings often paraphrased the conventions of new media is defended with an agility and intellectual vigor that prove, in the end, difficult to resist.”
– Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Marit Grøtta is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway.
