Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity

Françoise  MELTZER,  Seeing Double : Baudelaire’s Modernity. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, juin 2011. ISBN-13: 978-0226519883. 280 pages. 45 USD. 

E-book, mai 2011. ISBN-13: 9780226519876. 36 USD

Présentation de l’éditeur:

The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) 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.

Françoise 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.

Sommaire

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Beliefs (Assommons les pauvres!)

            Homo Duplex 

            More Duplexities 

            Maistre 

            Proudhon’s Spirits of Contradiction 

            Splitting the Difference: The Poem 

            Appendix: “Assommons les pauvres!” 

Chapter 2. Seeing (A une passante)

            The Will to Know 

            Images and Afterimages: The Poem      

            Certainty 

            Scopic Syllepsis 

            Which Is the Real One? 

            Optical Gaps 

            Energy: The Baroque 

            Appendix: “A une passante” 

Chapter 3. Money (La chambre double)

            Expenditure 

            Words Pay No Debts 

            Depletion: The Poem 

            Reversibility 

            Which Room Is Counterfeit? 

            The Other Side of the Coin 

            Appendix: “La chambre double” 

Chapter 4. Time (Harmonie du soir)

            God, Graves, and Scholars 

            In Memory of the Present 

            Angels Doing Time 

            Harmonics: The Poem 

             And Time and the World Are Ever in Flight 

            Appendix: “Harmonie du soir” 

Conclusion

Index