Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity

Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042879
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Baudelaire's essays on caricature offered the first sustained defense of the value of caricature as a serious art, worthy of study in its own right. This book argues for the crucial importance of the essays for his conception of modernity, so fundamental to the subsequent history of modernism. From the theory of the comic formulated in De l'essence du rire to his discussions of Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Bruegel, Grandville, Gavarni, Charlet, and many others, Baudelaire develops not only an aesthetic of caricature but also a caricatural aesthetic--dual and contradictory, grotesque, ironic, violent, farcical, fantastic, and fleeting--that defines an art of modern life. In particular, Baudelaire's insistence on the dualism and ambiguity of laughter has radical implications for such emblems of modernity as the city and the flâneur who roams the streets. The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flâneur with an image of dualism, one's position as subject and object, implicated in the same urban experiences one seems to control. The theory of the comic invests the idea of modernity with reciprocity, one's status as laughter and object of laughter, thus preventing the subjective construction and appropriation of the world that has so often been linked with the project of modernism. Comic art reflects what Walter Benjamin later defined as Baudelairean allegory, at once representing and revealing the alienation of modern experience. But Baudelaire also transforms the dualism of the comic into a peculiarly modern unity-- the doubling of the comic artist enacted for the benefit of the audience, the self-generating and self-reflexive experience of the flâneur in a "communion" with the crowd. This study examines his views in the context of the history of comic theory and contemporary accounts of the individual artists. Complete with illustrations of the many works discussed, it illuminates the history and theory of caricature, the comic, and the grotesque, and adds to our understanding of modernism in literature and the visual arts.

Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity

Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042879
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Baudelaire's essays on caricature offered the first sustained defense of the value of caricature as a serious art, worthy of study in its own right. This book argues for the crucial importance of the essays for his conception of modernity, so fundamental to the subsequent history of modernism. From the theory of the comic formulated in De l'essence du rire to his discussions of Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Bruegel, Grandville, Gavarni, Charlet, and many others, Baudelaire develops not only an aesthetic of caricature but also a caricatural aesthetic--dual and contradictory, grotesque, ironic, violent, farcical, fantastic, and fleeting--that defines an art of modern life. In particular, Baudelaire's insistence on the dualism and ambiguity of laughter has radical implications for such emblems of modernity as the city and the flâneur who roams the streets. The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flâneur with an image of dualism, one's position as subject and object, implicated in the same urban experiences one seems to control. The theory of the comic invests the idea of modernity with reciprocity, one's status as laughter and object of laughter, thus preventing the subjective construction and appropriation of the world that has so often been linked with the project of modernism. Comic art reflects what Walter Benjamin later defined as Baudelairean allegory, at once representing and revealing the alienation of modern experience. But Baudelaire also transforms the dualism of the comic into a peculiarly modern unity-- the doubling of the comic artist enacted for the benefit of the audience, the self-generating and self-reflexive experience of the flâneur in a "communion" with the crowd. This study examines his views in the context of the history of comic theory and contemporary accounts of the individual artists. Complete with illustrations of the many works discussed, it illuminates the history and theory of caricature, the comic, and the grotesque, and adds to our understanding of modernism in literature and the visual arts.

The Beauty of Baudelaire

The Beauty of Baudelaire PDF Author: Roger Pearson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192655078
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
This book offers the first comprehensive close reading in any language of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Taking full account of his critical writings on literature and the fine arts, it provides fresh readings of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris. It situates these works within the context of nineteenth-century French literature and culture and reassesses Baudelaire's reputation as the 'father' of modern poetry. Whereas he is traditionally considered to have rejected the public role of the writer as moralist, educator, and political leader and to have dedicated himself instead to the exclusive pursuit of beauty in art, this book contends not only that he rejected Art for Art's sake but that he saw in 'beauty'—defined not as an inherent quality but as an effect of harmony and rich conjecture—an alternative ethos with which to resist the tyrannies of ideology and conformism. Contrarian in his thinking and provocatively innovative in his poetic practice, Baudelaire fell foul of the law when six poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) were banned for obscenity. In the second edition (1861), substantially recast and enlarged, the poet as alternative lawgiver made plainer still his resistance to the orthodoxies of his day. In a series of major critical articles he proclaimed the 'government of the imagination', while from 1855 until his death he developed an alternative literary form, the prose poem—a thing of beauty and an invitation to imagine the world afresh, to make our own rules.

Baudelaire's Prose Poems

Baudelaire's Prose Poems PDF Author: Sonya Stephens
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780198158776
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The aim of this book is to offer a new reading of Baudelaire's Petits Poemes en prose which demonstrates the significance of ironic otherness for the theory and functioning of the work and for the genre of the prose poem itself. The book considers Baudelaire's choice of this genre and the wayin which he seeks to define it, both paratextually and textually. It examines the ways in which the prose poem depends on dualities and deboublements as forms of lyrical and narrative difference which, in their turn, reveal ideological otherness and declare the oppositionality of the prose poem.Finally, the book demonstrates a relationship between these forms of otherness and Baudelaire's theory of the popular comic arts and, in doing so, proposes that the prose poems should be read as literary caricature.

Baudelaire's World

Baudelaire's World PDF Author: Rosemary H. Lloyd
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728229
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet's work.Rosemary Lloyd considers all of Baudelaire's writing, including his criticism, theory, and letters, as well as poetry. In doing so, she sets the poems themselves in a richer context, in a landscape of real places populated with actual people. She shows how Baudelaire's poetry was marked by the influence of the writers and artists who preceded him or were his contemporaries. Lloyd builds an image of Baudelaire's world around major themes of his writing—childhood, women, reading, the city, dreams, art, nature, death. Throughout, she finds that his words and themes echo the historical and physical realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Lloyd also explores the possibilities and limitations of translation. As an integral part of her treatment of the life, poetry, and letters of her subject, she also reflects on published translations of Baudelaire's work and offers some of her own translations.

The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759-1838

The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759-1838 PDF Author: Todd Porterfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351544926
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
Searing disputes over caricature have recently sparked flames across the world?the culmination, not the beginning, of the story of one of modernity's definitive artistic practices. Modern visual satire erupts during a period marked by reform and revolution, by cohering nationalisms and expanding empires, and by the emerging discipline of art history. This has long been recognized as its Golden Age. It is time to look anew. In The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759-1838, an international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational team of scholars reconfigures the geography of modern visual satire, as the expansive narrative reaches from North America to Europe, to China and the Ottoman Empire. Caricature's specific visual cultures are also laid bare, its iconographic means and material support, as well as the diverse milieu of its making?the military, the art academy, diplomacy, politics, art criticism, and popular entertainment. Some of its greatest practitioners?James Gillray and Honor?aumier?are seen in a new light, alongside some of their far flung and opportunistic pastichers. Most trenchantly, assumptions about the consequences of caricature's rise come under intense scrutiny, interrogated for its cherished and long-vaunted civilizational claims on individual character, artistic supremacy, political liberty, and global domination.

Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration

Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration PDF Author: Keri Yousif
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317176359
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honoré de Balzac and the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French July Monarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on the influential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production, showing how writers were forced to position themselves both in terms of the established literary hierarchy and in relation to the rapidly advancing image. As Yousif shows, the industrialization of the illustrated book spawned a triadic relationship between publisher, writer, and illustrator that transformed the book from a product of individual genius to a cooperative and commercial affair. Her study represents a significant contribution to our understanding of literature, art, and their interactions in a new marketplace for publication during the fraught transition from Romanticism to Realism.

The Aesthetics of Comics

The Aesthetics of Comics PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271038377
Category : Comic books, strips, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description


Character and Satire in Post War Fiction

Character and Satire in Post War Fiction PDF Author: Ian Gregson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441130004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known postwar novelists including Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter and Will Self, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.

Graphic Design

Graphic Design PDF Author: Paul Jobling
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719044670
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This is an inventive a well-researched study which explores the production and consumption of graphic design in Europe.

Imagery and Ideology

Imagery and Ideology PDF Author: William J. Berg
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874139952
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Literature is ostensibly a sequential and thus temporal medium, and painting a static and spatial one; yet writers like George Sand and Emile Zola have attempted repeatedly to represent visual and spatial phenomena in literary texts, just as painters like Eugene Delacroix and Claude Monet have sought consistently to capture effects of time and movement on canvas. The incorporation of elements from one artistic medium into another creates a dynamic interplay of image and ideology, both between art forms and within individual texts and paintings, which constitutes the crux of this book. Each chapter involves the detailed analysis of a text and a painting, related through topic, theme, and technique. By juxtaposing the works of ten major writers and ten painters of comparable stature, the book explores the various modalities and layers of meaning in nineteenth-century French art, both verbal and visual, and proposes ways of reading the ambivalent artifacts of "modernity." Illustrated.