Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:49:07.740Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Baudelaire's Theory of Practice: Ideology and Difference in “Les yeux des pauvres”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Geraldine Friedman
Geraldine Friedman*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Baudelaire's poetry dramatizes the self-effacing quality of dominant discourse so well that until recently critics have failed to engage his interest in ideology. In the prose poem “Les yeux des pauvres,” the traces of that self-effacement allow us to read the ideological implications of what seem to be the text's purely aesthetic and ethical dimensions. By staging encounters with social and sexual difference, “Les yeux” challenges the principle of reflexivity underlying its announced aesthetic of the correspondences. In questioning the logic of the same that governs the mystified speaker's figuration and psychology, the text asks whether and how an Other can escape the confines of the official egalitarian ideology of post-1848 France, which tends to cast alterity in its own image.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 3 , May 1989 , pp. 317 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adam, Antoine, ed. Les fleurs du mal. By Charles Baudelaire. Paris: Garnier, 1959.Google Scholar
Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Pichois, Claude. 2 vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Briefe. Ed. Scholem, Gershom and Adorno, Theodor. Vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. 2 vols.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus. Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Tiedemann, Rolf and Scholem, Hermann Schweppenhäuser with Theodor Adorno and Gershom. Vol. 1, pt. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. 509–690. 6 vols. 1972–85.Google Scholar
Berman, Marshall. “Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets.” Partisan Review 46 (1979): 205–22.Google Scholar
Bernard, Suzanne. Le poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu'à nos jours. Paris: Nizet, 1959.Google Scholar
Chadbourne, Richard H. 'The Generation of 1848: Four Writers and Their Affinities.“ Essays in French Literature 5 (1968): 1–21.Google Scholar
Delcroix, Maurice. “Un poème en prose de Charles Baudelaire: ‘Lex yeux des pauvres.‘” Cahiers d'analyse textuelle 19 (1977): 47–65.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. “The Resistance to Theory.” de Man, Resistance 3–20.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Theory and History of Literature 33. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Google Scholar
Fietkau, Wolfgang. Schwanengesang auf 1848: Ein Rendezvous am Louvre. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Vol. I: An Introduction. Trans. Hurley, Robert. New York: Random, 1978.Google Scholar
Furet, François. “The French Revolution Is Over.” Interpreting the French Revolution. Trans. Forster, Elborg. New York: Cambridge UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Godzich, Wlad. Foreword. “The Tiger on the Paper Mat.” de Man, Resistance ix–xviii.Google Scholar
Hamburger, Michael. “Kindische Utopie und brutale Täuschung: Anmerkungen über Baudelaire und die Geschichte eines Dilemmas.” Akzente 9 (1959–60): 304–21.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache.” Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. 83–155.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung.” Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. 2nd ed. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951. 31–45.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 7th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953.Google Scholar
Howard, Jean. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13–43.Google Scholar
Johnson, Barbara. Défigurations du langage poétique: La seconde révolution baudelairienne. Paris: Flammarion, 1979.Google Scholar
Klein, Richard. “Baudelaire and Revolution: Some Notes.” Yale French Studies 39 (1967): 85–97.Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.Google Scholar
Mercer, Colin. “Baudelaire and the City: 1848 and the Inscription of Hegemony.” Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–84. Ed. Barker, Francis, Hulme, Peter, Iversen, Margaret, and Loxley, Diana. London: Methuen, 1986. 17–34.Google Scholar
Merriman, John M. The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–1851. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Pechter, Edward. “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama.” PMLA 102 (1987): 292–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.Google Scholar
Punter, David, Aers, David, Clark, Robert, Cook, Jonathan, and Elsasser, Thomas. “Strategies for Representing Revolution.” 1789: Reading Writing Revolution. Ed. Francis Barker et al. Proc. of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature. July 1981. Essex: U of Essex P, 1982. 82–100.Google Scholar
Reff, Theodore. “Manet and the Paris of Haussmann and Baudelaire.” Sharpe and Wallock, Visions 131–63.Google Scholar
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel. “Die kompendienartige Darstellung von 1819.” Hermeneutik. 2nd ed. Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 1974.Google Scholar
Sharpe, William, and Wallock, Leonard. Introduction. “From ‘Great Town’ to ‘Nonplace Urban Realm’: Reading of the Modern City.” Sharpe and Wallock, Visions 7–46.Google Scholar
Sharpe, William, eds. Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Literature, and Art. Proc. of the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Feb.-Mar. 1983. New York: Columbia U, 1983.Google Scholar
Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Zeldin, Theodore. Ambition, Love, and Politics. Vol. 1 of France 1848–1945. Oxford History of Modern Europe. Gen. ed. Bullock, Alan and Deakin, F. W. D. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. 2 vols.CrossRefGoogle Scholar