Reminder: Lecture: "Baudelaire and the Second Empire" - 8 May 2019 - Institute of Modern L

Baudelaire and the Second Empire

Date 8 May 2019, 5.30pm - 7.30pm

Type Lecture

Venue Blumsbury Room, G35, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Description

French Week

Speaker: Professor Jean-Michel Gouvard (Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne)

With his uncompleted Paris Spleen, whose writing was interrupted by illness and a soon coming death, Baudelaire made a last attempt to reflect upon the situation of the artist in society of the Second Empire, “in the age of high capitalism”, to quote the famous – but also problematic, as we will see – phrase by Walter Benjamin’s. Following Marc Berdet’s proposal, what Baudelaire did in his prose poems could be compared to a ragman’s work, the poet collecting wastes of the Napoleonian Paris to reveal the true face of the society he is living in. But metaphorical rags of the 19th century are not only objects, places or monuments, they are also people living on the margins of society, and especially female figures as comedians, prostitutes, lesbians, black women, freaks, whose shadows haunt the Paris of Baudelaire – which will lead us to reevaluate women’s role in his work.

References: Marc Berdet, Le chiffonnier de Paris: Walter Benjamin et les fantasmagories, Paris, Vrin, 2015. Jean-Michel Gouvard, Charles Baudelaire. Le Spleen de Paris, Paris, Ellipses, 2015.

All are welcome to attend this free event. Please register in advance as places are limited: Book now.