Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems
- Editor: Cheryl Krueger
- Pages: 212 pp.
- Published: 2017
- ISBN: 9781603292726 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603292719 (Hardcover)
“The book is designed for those teaching upper-level literature courses, and as such it is a valuable contribution to Baudelaire studies. . . . [T]he volume is well researched and well written, and the contributors make an admirable effort to link literary research to literary pedagogy.”
—Jeremy Patterson, French Review
A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse (Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil]) and prose poems (Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen]). This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and offer compelling and fraught representations of urban expansion, social change, and modernity.
Part 1, “Materials,” surveys the valuable resources available for teaching Baudelaire, including editions and translations of his oeuvre, historical accounts of his life and writings, scholarly works, and online databases. In Part 2, “Approaches,” experienced instructors present strategies for teaching critical debates on Baudelaire’s prose poems, addressing topics such as translation theory, literary genre, alterity, poetics, narrative theory, and ethics as well as the shifting social, economic, and political terrain of the nineteenth century in France and beyond. The essays offer interdisciplinary connections and outline traditional and fresh approaches for teaching Baudelaire’s prose poems in a wide range of classroom contexts.
Cheryl Krueger is associate professor of French at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire’s Poetry in Prose and coauthor of Tâches d’encre and Mise-en-scène: Cinéma et lecture. Her articles on French literature, film, and cultural studies have appeared in a variety of journals. Her current book project treats the culture and poetics of olfaction and perfume in nineteenth-century France.
Joseph Acquisto
Heather Willis Allen
Aimée Boutin
Scott Carpenter
Peter Connor
Edward K. Kaplan
Françoise Lionnet
Claire Chi-ah Lyu
Stamos Metzidakis
Catherine Nesci
Kate Paesani
Laurence M. Porter
Larson Powell
Scott M. Powers
Debarati Sanyal
Beryl Schlossman
Maria Scott
Acknowledgments (ix)
Preface (xi)
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Editions and Translations (3)
The Instructor’s Library (4)
Baudelaire’s Life and Work
Historical and Social Contexts
The Prose Poem Genre in France
Reception and Influence outside France
Studies of Baudelaire’s Prose Poems
Teaching Literature in Foreign Language Programs
Literature and the Humanities
Courses (7)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction (11)
Reading Strategies
The Lyric Self and Its Others in Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose: Teaching Strategies (18)
A Renewed Relationship with Words: Reacting to Evil through “Le Mauvais Vitrier” (29)
Who Is the “Je” of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris? Engaging Undergraduate Students in the Study of Narrative Voice and Polyphony (37)
What’s the Point? Allegory and the Prose Poems (45)
An Ethical Reading of Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (54)
Literary and Aesthetic Currents
(Post-)Romantic Vision in Le Spleen de Paris (64)
The Poet’s Lost Halo — Reading Paris Spleen with Walter Benjamin in Baudelaire-Ville (73)
Baudelaire Modern and Antimodern: Le Spleen de Paris in an Interdisciplinary Course on Modernity (88)
Social and Cultural Intersections
How to Read (Women) in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (96)
Pedagogies of Violence: A Tour through Baudelaire’s Fight Clubs (107)
The Glazier’s Cry: Dissonance in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (120)
Worlding Baudelaire: Geography, Genre, and Translation (128)
The Prose Poems across the Curriculum
“L’Invitation au voyage”: A Multiliteracies Approach to Teaching Genre in an Advanced Writing Course (139)
The Rhetoric of Intermediality: Teaching Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage” in a Translation Class (150)
Translation Studies and the Prose Poems (158)
Print and Digital Culture
The Poet as Journalist: Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems with the History of the Press (166)
Le Spleen de Paris and the Cyberflâneur (176)
Notes on Contributors (185)
Survey Respondents (189)
Works Cited (191)
Index of Names (209)
