1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
mixed bag, not for the general reader, July 11, 2009
This review is from: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity (Hardcover)
Baudelaire (1821-1867), probably more than any modern poet, has fascinated generation after generation of poets, composers, and critics. The former two have looked to "Les Fleurs du Mal" as a model and a source of inspiration -- the poetry is extraordinarily good, in places even profound, and overall highly musical -- while the latter, well, that's where the phrase "cottage industry" comes in. This collection, while it contains some interesting pieces, mostly shows how easy it is to get mired in navel gazing and useless speculation and go over the deep end.
It may not be a logical fallacy to try to figure out the message by looking inside the head of the messenger, but it's close enough to make one wish people would stay away from this approach. Psychobabble is what we get from Miner's article -- but then, Sartre's book on Baudelaire started it all and I wish he hadn't. Baudelaire was a genius of the first caliber; he was born that way; putting him on the couch will only tell you something about ... the shrink and the couch.
Franke (and others writing about symbols) could have used an elementary course in logic so he would not write stuff like "symbolization begins when one thing is used to stand for something else" and later, self-contradictorily, that "Baudelaire identifies everything with everything else." Of course, Baudelaire does no such thing and it's language that (in a way that is technically quite complicated and addressed in model theory) can be said first and foremost to be a symbol -- which itself is ambiguous between symbol-type and symbol-token (look it up).
Brix insists that Baudelaire is not a Platonist but presents evidence in rather selective fashion, leaving out many, many passages that suggest the contrary. Nor is it clear that he (Brix) has a clear understanding of Platonism in the philosophically correct sense of the term as opposed to the usual vague descriptions. This is too bad because the assumption of Platonism shows what a deep book "Les Fleurs du Mal" really is. This should come as good news, because connecting anything to a large philosophical theory is bound to shed light on what's going on.
You know you're down in the weeds where experts are just whispering to each other when an article comments on the views of a major critic who spilled a lot of (in this case Marxist) ink on Baudelaire. That's what you get in Newmark's piece on the (long dead) German critic Walter Benjamin. Have a look if you don't believe me.
I'm a big fan of the Australian scholar Rosemary Lloyd and her wonderful book on Baudelaire; her article is the best of the bunch by far in this collection. She writes clearly (no blue prose), her translations are excellent, and makes many insightful points, jus as she did in her book.
So, get this book if you're working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature or Baudelaire or something like that. Otherwise, skip it.
P.S. Anyone looking for a clear and incisive review of "Les Fleurs du Mal" should check out Swinburne's -- yes, Algernon Charles, that dude, written (believe it or not) in a Paris turkish bath in 1862. Swinburne writes "... nothing is wrongly given, nothing capable of being re-written or improved on its own ground" -- high praise indeed from another poet of stature.
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