Writing Poetry Against the Grain: Or, What Can Be Seen in "Les Yeux des pauvres"

[...]here, as in texts such as "Assommons les pauvres," "La Fausse monnaie," or "Un plaisant," where the sphere of the social emerges in disfigured guises out of a blind-spot in the narrative which we might call "idiocy" (or, being radically self-absorbed), Ba...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:French forum 2014, Vol.39 (1), p.49-63
Main Author: Clair, Robert St
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Foregrounding
History
Humans
Ideology
Literary criticism
Mythology
Narrative poetry
Narrators
Poetry
Poverty
Prose
Prose poetry
Reading
Rubble
Spleen
Subjectivity
Violence
Writing
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Summary:[...]here, as in texts such as "Assommons les pauvres," "La Fausse monnaie," or "Un plaisant," where the sphere of the social emerges in disfigured guises out of a blind-spot in the narrative which we might call "idiocy" (or, being radically self-absorbed), Baudelaire's prose poem operates as the site of what we propose to conceptualize as a form of ideological dispossession: that is, a discursive practice foregrounding the material dispossession of the poor in Haussmanns Paris, and complicating a form of subjectivity we might call "literary" (that is, the posture of a subject apt to passively, if somewhat philanthropic ally, consume the misery engendered by the process of production).
ISSN:0098-9355
1534-1836
1534-1836
DOI:10.1353/frf.2014.0007