
Seeing Double
Baudelaire's Modernity
Francoise Meltzer(Author)
University of Chicago Press
Will be published approx. on 15. June 2011
Book
Hardback
280 pages
978-0-226-51988-3 (ISBN)
Description
The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. "Seeing Double" reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire's writing during a time of political and social upheaval. Francoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaire's penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what Meltzer calls his 'double vision' - a way of seeing that produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that can't advance, and communications that always seem to falter.
In looking again at the poet and his work, "Seeing Double" helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.
In looking again at the poet and his work, "Seeing Double" helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.
Reviews / Votes
"Perceptive and powerfully imaginative, this book will interest all scholars and students of nineteenth-century thought, as well as those investigating the philosophical questions that arose from the emergence of a newly technologized world." (Marie-Helene Huet, Princeton University)"More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 23 mm
Width: 16 mm
Thickness: 2 mm
Weight
539 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-51988-3 (9780226519883)
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Other editions
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E-Book
05/2024
1st Edition
University of Chicago Press
from
€71.79
Available for download
Person
Francoise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and professor in the Divinity School and the College at the University of Chicago, where she is chair of comparative literature as well as coeditor of Critical Inquiry. She is the author of For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity, among other books.