Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flneur and 19th-Century Media

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Baudelaires 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 Baudelaires 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, Baudelaires Media Aesthetics argues 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 Baudelaires aesthetics and that his modernist aesthetics can be conceived of, to a large degree, as a media aesthetics. Highlighting Baudelaires interaction with the media of his age, Baudelaires 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 Baudelaires writings, the figure of the flneur, and modernist aesthetics.

Reviews

Grtta 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 Baudelaires writings often paraphrased the conventions of new media is defended with an agility and intellectual vigor that prove, in the end, difficult to resist. * Times Literary Supplement *
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, Grtta argues that Baudelaires 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 Baudelaires prose poems and theories of writers as different as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Agamben, Grtta skillfully brings to light Baudelaires 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 *
Grtta offers a thorough examination of the poets art as the aesthetics of Pariss flneur par excellence. ... A time museum of sorts, this book can be conceived as a stroll through galleries devoted to the new media available in Baudelaires society. The role of newspapers, photographs, precinematic devices, toys, and corporeality in Baudelaires works is substantiated by remarkable analyses of his Petits Pomes en Prose. Grtta skilfully masters the delicate art of lively description. .... All in all, Marit Grttas monograph is a delightful and perfectly documented work that certainly deserves to be read by comparative literature scholars. As an original effort to bridge the gap between too often separated though arguably related disciplines, this book definitely offers new avenues through which to explore the link between literary analysis and visual (or other) mediation. ... [Readers] will surely appreciate the opportunity of going back in time offered by Grottas remarkable scholarly work. * Recherche littraire/Literary Research *
[Grtta] has provided the contextprior and contemporaryto Baudelaires writings in a large number of areas: fascinating glimpses of public amusements, optical toys, slang expressions, as well as explanations, market considerations, and interpretations. This wealth of information makes her argumentsclearly restated at chapters endeasy to accept. ... What Grtta does is essential to a deeper understanding of Baudelaire: despite Baudelaires aversion to photography, she detects in it a cult of the image and a concept of identity that would only become widespread with the advent of the twentieth century and its use of identity cards. ... Grtta traces Baudelaires debts, and these debts are not to the usual authors and creditors, but to fields, devices, and practices that the poet explicitly disdained: the press, and its use of commonplaces; photography, and its appeal to the masses and their uncritical acceptance of its truth; toys, and their vulgarity. * Nineteenth-Century French Studies *
This assured study looks at the wide aesthetic implications of Baudelaires engagement with new and emerging media technologies. With chapters on newspapers, photographs, and pre-cinematic devices such as the kaleidoscope, Marit Grttas book challenges narrow Benjaminian-inflected readings of Baudelaire by offering fresh analyses of familiar prose poems that showcase Baudelaires awareness of new ways of experiencing the world This book is suitable for readers both familiar with and new to Baudelaire. Grttas strength lies in the limpidity of her writing, which clearly condenses Baudelaires aesthetic thought in relation to different media forms. * French Studies *
Grtta clearly knows Baudelaires personal and literary writings very well and skilfully reads the interactions between media and literature ... Baudelaires Media Aesthetics will be of particular value for anyone who is interested in Baudelaire as a writer and also, perhaps not that surprisingly, for those interested in Walter Benjamin. * The British Society for Literature and Science *
Grttas Baudelaires Media Aesthetics is a highly topical, trans-disciplinary exploration of Baudelaires 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, Grttas discussion sheds new light not only on Baudelaires writings, but also on the figure of the flneur, 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 Baudelaires 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 Benjamins 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 Literature, Cornell University, USA *
Marit Grttas 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 unconsciousand 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, Grtta offers a fresh portrait of the flneur, 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 Flneur et les flneuses (2007) *
Baudelaires Media Aesthetics invites us to look back at Charles Baudelaires writings through the specificity and historicity of new technologies of vision rather than with the naked eye alone. The book analyses a thought-provoking combination of mediato study similarities between Baudelaires encounters with different media and assess how media played a role in shaping his idea of modernity. The entire book is clearly argued and logically presented. Grttas book therefore makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Baudelaire, a lyric poet in the age of new media (6) as read by Benjamin, but also of Benjamins writings on visual technologies as they relate to Baudelaire by way of Agambens readings of both Baudelaire and Benjamin. The books appeal is indeed that it can make such complex connections among poems and media in an engaging, coherent, and lucid analysis. * French Forum *

Author Bio

Marit Grtta is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway.