Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France

Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France
Author: Scott Carpenter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2016-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317184807

In his engagingly written and original book, Scott Carpenter analyzes multiple manifestations of the false in nineteenth-century France. Under Carpenter's thorough and systematic analysis, fraudulence emerges as a cultural preoccupation in nineteenth-century literature and society, whether it be in the form of literary mystifications, the thematic portrayal of frauds, or the privileging of falseness as an aesthetic principle. Focusing particularly on the aesthetics of fraudulence in works by Mérimée, Balzac, Baudelaire, Vidocq, Sand, and others, Carpenter places these literary representations within the context of other cultural phenomena, such as caricature, political history, and ceremonial events. As he highlights the special relationship between literary fiction and fraudulence, Carpenter argues that falseness arises as an aesthetic preoccupation in post-revolutionary France, where it introduces a blurring of limits between hitherto discrete categories. This transgression of boundaries challenges notions of authenticity and sincerity, categories that Romantic aesthetics championed at the beginning of the nineteenth century in France. Carpenter's study makes an important contribution to the cultural significance of mystification in nineteenth-century France and furthers our understanding of French literature and cultural history.

Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France

Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France
Author: Scott Carpenter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2016-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317184815

In his engagingly written and original book, Scott Carpenter analyzes multiple manifestations of the false in nineteenth-century France. Under Carpenter's thorough and systematic analysis, fraudulence emerges as a cultural preoccupation in nineteenth-century literature and society, whether it be in the form of literary mystifications, the thematic portrayal of frauds, or the privileging of falseness as an aesthetic principle. Focusing particularly on the aesthetics of fraudulence in works by Mérimée, Balzac, Baudelaire, Vidocq, Sand, and others, Carpenter places these literary representations within the context of other cultural phenomena, such as caricature, political history, and ceremonial events. As he highlights the special relationship between literary fiction and fraudulence, Carpenter argues that falseness arises as an aesthetic preoccupation in post-revolutionary France, where it introduces a blurring of limits between hitherto discrete categories. This transgression of boundaries challenges notions of authenticity and sincerity, categories that Romantic aesthetics championed at the beginning of the nineteenth century in France. Carpenter's study makes an important contribution to the cultural significance of mystification in nineteenth-century France and furthers our understanding of French literature and cultural history.

Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem

Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem
Author: Seth Whidden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192849905

A study of Charles Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris (1859) that explores how the practice of reading prose poems might be different from reading poetry in verse, illustrating how Baudelaire wrote texts that he considered poems and how this form shows aspects of his poetic modernity.

Theodore De Banville

Theodore De Banville
Author: David Evans
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2018-12-13
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1351539280

Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) was a prolific poet, dramatist, critic and prose fiction writer whose significant contribution to poetic and aesthetic debates in nineteenth-century France has long been overlooked. Despite his profound influence on major writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarme, Banville polarised critical opinion throughout his fifty-year career. While supporters championed him as a virtuoso of French verse, many critics dismissed his formal pyrotechnics, effervescent rhythms and extravagant rhymes as mere clowning. This book explores how Banville's remarkably coherent body of verse theory and practice, full of provocative energy and mischievous humour, shaped debates about poetic value and how to identify it during a period of aesthetic uncertainty caused by diverse social, economic, political and artistic factors. It features a detailed new reading of Banville's most infamous and misunderstood text, the Petit Traitede poesie francaise, as well as extended analyses of verse collections such as Les Stalactites, Odes funambulesques, Les Exiles, Trente-six Ballades and Rondels, illuminated by wide reference to Banville's plays, fiction and journalism. Evans elucidates not only aesthetic tensions at the heart of nineteenth-century French verse, but also a centuries-old tension between verse mechanisms and an unquantifiable, mysterious and elusive poeticity which emerges as one of the defining narratives of poetic value from the Middle Ages, via the Grands Rhetoriqueurs and Dada, to the experiments of the OuLiPo and beyond.

Faking, Forging, Counterfeiting

Faking, Forging, Counterfeiting
Author: Daniel Becker
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2018-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839437628

Forgeries are an omnipresent part of our culture and closely related to traditional ideas of authenticity, legality, authorship, creativity, and innovation. Based on the concept of mimesis, this volume illustrates how forgeries must be understood as autonomous aesthetic practices - creative acts in themselves - rather than as mere rip-offs of an original work of art. The proceedings bring together research from different scholarly fields. They focus on various mimetic practices such as pseudo-translations, imposters, identity theft, and hoaxes in different artistic and historic contexts. By opening up the scope of the aesthetic implications of fakes, this anthology aims to consolidate forging as an autonomous method of creation.

Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems

Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems
Author: Cheryl Krueger
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 160329273X

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 writing, 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.

The National Habitus

The National Habitus
Author: Marie-Pierre Le Hir
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2014-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110363062

Stories about border crossers, illegal aliens, refugees that regularly appear in the press everywhere point to the crucial role national identity plays in human beings' lives today. The National Habitus seeks to understand how and why national belonging became so central to a person's identity and sense of identity. Centered on the acquisition of the national habitus, the process that transforms subjects into citizens when a state becomes a nation-state, the book examines this transformation at the individual level in the case of nineteenth century France. Literary texts serve as primary material in this study of national belonging, because, as Germaine de Staël pointed out long ago, literature has the unique ability to provide access to "inner feelings." The term "habitus," in the title of this book, signals a departure from traditional approaches to nationalism, a break with the criteria of language, race, and ethnicity typically used to examine it. It is grounded instead in a sociology that deals with the subjective dimension of life and is best exemplified by the works of Norbert Elias (1897–1990) and Pierre Bourdieu (1931–2002), two sociologists who approach belief systems like nationalism from a historical, instead of an ethical vantage point. By distinguishing between two groups of major French writers, three who experienced the 1789 Revolution firsthand as adults (Olympe de Gouges, François René de Chateaubriand and Germaine de Staël) and three who did not (Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, and George Sand), the book captures evolving understandings of the nation, as well as thoughts and emotions associated with national belonging over time. Le Hir shows that although none of these writers is typically associated with nationalism, all of them were actually affected by the process of nationalization of feelings, thoughts, and habits, irrespective of aesthetic preferences, social class, or political views. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had learned to feel and view themselves as French nationals; they all exhibited the characteristic features of the national habitus: love of their own nation, distrust and/or hatred of other nations. By underscoring the dual contradictory nature of the national habitus, the book highlights the limitations nation-based identities impose on the prospect for peace.

Time Travelers

Time Travelers
Author: Adelene Buckland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 022667682X

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.

Criminal Papers

Criminal Papers
Author: Rosemary A. Peters
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1443838489

Throughout the nineteenth century, shady characters appear in French writings from one end of the literary spectrum to another. While Paris gleams through the night, the City of Lights has a darker underside with its own infrastructure, its own rules and traditions – and its own literature. In the shadows of the capital, thieves, murderers, addicts, shoplifters, seducers, and smugglers carry out their nefarious acts, pursued by detectives (both police and private) who seek to apprehend and analyze them. These novels pave the way for a new genre, the detective novel or roman polar, which gains ever-increasing popularity as the nineteenth century moves toward its close and the twentieth dawns with developments in literature and other genres. These stories are experimental by nature, and lend themselves to further innovations, both apertures (to borrow Barthes’s term) and departures. In addition, the detective stories of the nineteenth century contribute to the creation of a new art in the twentieth century: they are part and parcel of the work of film, especially film noir. This volume considers literature of the criminal underworld and its encounters with society, in the city and the popular imagination. The twelve essays compiled here examine the intersections between law and literature in the nineteenth century, from the newly adjusted property laws after the Revolution of 1789 through the scientific discourse around kleptomania in the fin-de-siècle. The authors question how texts, both canonical and “paraliterary,” are inscribed into the social, political, economic and artistic dialogues of the period. Other questions come up in these textual examinations: how are real-life criminals and the spaces they inhabit translated into literary ones? How do crimes in novels reflect or produce social tensions and preoccupations around issues of gender, education, class, and ideology? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be the “author of a crime”?