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

Baudelaire's 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 Baudelaire's 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, Baudelaire's 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 Baudelaire's aesthetics and that his modernist aesthetics can be conceived of, to a large degree, as a media aesthetics.Highlighting Baudelaire's interaction with the media of his age, Baudelaire's 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 Baudelaire's writings, the figure of the flâneur, and modernist aesthetics. Review Grøtta 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 Baudelaire s 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, Grøtta argues that Baudelaire s 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 Baudelaire s prose poems and theories of writers as different as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Agamben, Grøtta skillfully brings to light Baudelaire s 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 Grøtta offers a thorough examination of the poet s art as the aesthetics of Paris s flâneur par excellence. ... A time museum of sorts, this book can be conceived as a stroll through galleries devoted to the new media available in Baudelaire s society. The role of newspapers, photographs, precinematic devices, toys, and corporeality in Baudelaire s works is substantiated by remarkable analyses of his Petits Poèmes en Prose. Grøtta skilfully masters the delicate art of lively description. .... All in all, Marit Grøtta s 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 Grotta s remarkable scholarly work. --- Recherche littéraire/Literary Research[Grøtta] has provided the context prior and contemporary to Baudelaire's writings in a large number of areas: fascinating glimpses of public amusements, optical toys,