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Baudelaire and Other People / Baudelaire et Autrui

Baudelaire and Other People / Baudelaire et Autrui

Publié le par Université de Lausanne (Source : Maria Scott)

Baudelaire and Other People / Baudelaire et Autrui

Call for article proposals for a Spring 2018 special issue of L’Esprit Créateur, on the theme of ‘Baudelaire and Other People’, to be guest edited by Maria Scott (Univ. of Exeter) and Alexandra Wettlaufer (Univ. of Texas at Austin).

One hundred and fifty years after the death of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), his work remains a central focus of interest and investigation for scholars of modernity across a range of disciplines and discourses. One of the reasons why Baudelaire’s work remains such a key point of reference for art historians, cultural historians, urban studies specialists, and literary scholars is that it explores a phenomenon that continues to be a major preoccupation today, namely what it means to live in permanent proximity to other people. Baudelaire is often understood to embody the solitary individual whose psychic, moral, poetic, and even physical integrity is threatened by the presence of other people. For Sartre, Baudelaire’s defensive stance against the gaze of “Autrui” is what defines him and his work. The theme of autrui is also central to Walter Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire, which analyses the shock effects produced by life in a modern city and the mechanisms developed to defend the psyche against the potential violence of random encounters with others. Crowded urban spaces produce at least as much anxiety and exhilaration today as they did in Baudelaire’s time; encounters with strangers, whether in person or on social media, continue to be a source of both uneasiness and pleasure.

In its first part, this collection of essays will take a fresh look at Baudelaire’s understanding and theorization of other people and of otherness more generally. A second section will focus on his understanding and theorization of aesthetic alterity as well as his real and virtual collaborations with other artists. Both of these sections will seek to present new interpretations of Baudelaire’s thinking about other people, interpretations that might enable us to think differently, and sometimes more affirmatively, about how the otherness of other people was negotiated by this founding figure of European modernity. To what extent does the poet’s conceptualization of the self-other relation anticipate the internalization of otherness associated with the modern subjectivity that he helped to construct? How can we situate Baudelaire’s thinking about the self-other relation within current debates in psychology and transdisciplinary literary studies about the relationship between empathy, emotional contagion, and moral agency? How might Baudelaire help us to think about how we respond to the foreign other? In its third and final section, this special issue will explore some of the ways in which others have responded to Baudelaire’s work. Indeed, this special issue itself constitutes an attempt to encounter the other that was Baudelaire, following Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that for her, as for Proust, “la littérature est le lieu privilégié de l’inter-subjectivité” (“Que peut la littérature?,” 1965) and Antoine Compagnon’s definition of literature as “un moyen – certains diront même le seul – de préserver et de transmettre l’expérience des autres” (La Littérature, pour quoi faire?, 2007). Accordingly, and in the spirit of a collaborative paradigm linking international scholars and scholarship, the contributors to this collection will develop their proposed essays in constructive, on-going dialogue with one another, exchanging working drafts of the articles in March 2017, in advance of a planned round-table discussion on “Baudelaire and Other People” at a Society of Dix-Neuviémistes conference at the University of Kent, Canterbury in April 2017, in which many, if not all of us, will participate. The key question that this special issue will ask is: what does Baudelaire’s work suggest to us about what it means truly to encounter another person?

Article proposals, in either French or English, should be approx. 300 words in length, and should arrive at the following email addresses by end Friday 4 November 2016:m.scott@exeter.ac.uk and akw@austin.utexas.edu