Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin

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Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin's final texts in the 1930s, Untimely Beggar investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature's relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws from representing objects and registers the existence of power. By reducing itself to the indication of its own potential, by impoverishing itself, literary language attempts to engage and participate in the power of the poor.