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Violence of Modernity:

Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form
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The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, oneof the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in orderto reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historicalcritique. Works of modern literature are commonlytheorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history.In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique,Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literaryexperience in terms that recall its contestatory potential.Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focusof critical attention toward an account of modernism as anactive engagement with violence, specifically the violenceof history in nineteenth-century France.Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditionalhallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity,and formalism—to challenge the historical violenceof modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writingin his wake teach us how to read and resist the violenceof history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenorof our contemporary “wound culture. In a series of provocativereadings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry asan aesthetic form that contests historical violence throughrhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, andcritique.Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry,Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors in-fluenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, VirginieDespentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examinethe relevance of their interventions for our currentclimate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscoreshow Baudelaire's legacy continues to energizeliterary engagements with the violence of modernity.

AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionPart I: Violence and Representation in Baudelaire1. Baudelaire's Victims and Executioners: From the Symptoms of Trauma to a Critique of Violence2. Passages from Form to Politics: Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris3. Bodies in Motion, Texts on Stage: Baudelaire's Women and the Forms of ModernityPart II: Unlikely Contestations: Baudelaire's Legacy Revisited4. Matter's Revenge on Form: Bad Girls Talk Back5. Broken Engagements: Albert Camus and the Poetics of TerrorAfterwordNotesWorks CitedIndex

""One of the most solidly critically informed works in the field.""

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