phi380+eng380 jan+15+2015
TRANSCRIPT
Emma Dreiser
TD& Emma Dreiser
Theresa Dreiser
http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/dreiser/442-2.html
Wells Street Station (1904)
Fifth Ave.
Wholesale & Shopping District
Fair Department Store
Fair Department Store
Marshall Field
Marshall Field
Rector’s Restaurant
Rector’s Restaurant
http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/swanberg/swa-13.html
http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/dreiser/442-1.html
Hannah & Hogg’s Saloon (CHI)
Subjects: Exterior of McVicker's TheatrePlace: 25 W. Madison St., Chicago, Illinois
Palmer House Hotel
Nick, the Dreiser Dog
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
Walter Benjamin (1892-1939)
“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
(1939)
Benjamin on Baudelaire
Themes:
Decline of lyric poetry
The modern situation (esp. urbanism)
Consciousness-shock-modernity
Benjamin on Baudelaire
“Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a
reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of
the shock, he calls this man 'a kaleidoscope equipped with
consciousness'“
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939
Benjamin on Baudelaire
Themes:
Decline of lyric poetry
The modern situation (esp. urbanism)
Consciousness-shock-modernity
“Aura”
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
Bohemians
vs.
Dandys
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
The dandy must have “no profession other than elegance... no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons... The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; hemust live and sleep before a mirror.”
Albert Camus on the dandy
“he can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others‘ faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it's true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated ,spurred on by provocation.”
Albert Camus on the dandy
“The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying theirvalues. He plays at life because he is unable to live it.”“
Baudelaire, Fleurs de Mal (1857)
One creature only is most foul and false!Though making no grand gestures, nor great cries,He willingly would devastate the earthAnd in one yawning swallow all the world;
He is Ennui! with tear-filled eye he dreamsOf scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.Reader, you know this dainty monster too;- Hypocrite reader, - fellowman, - my twin!
Baudelaire, Letters to His Mother, dated December 30, 1857
“I have fallen into a ceaseless nervous terror, with frightful sleep, frightful awakenings, and can do nothing. My copies lay a whole month on the table before I found the courage to put them in envelopes… How hard it is, not to think a book, but to write it without weariness. […] I feel an immense discouragement, a feeling of unbearable isolation, an entire distrust of my strength, a total lack of desires, inability to find any amusement whatsoever. The odd success of my book and the quarrels it has stirred up interested me for a while, and then I relapsed… I constantly ask myself, What use is this? What use is that? This is the true spirit of spleen.”
The Flâneur
“The only, the true sovereign of Paris I will name for you: he is the flâneur.”
A. Bazin, L'Epoque sans nom, esquisses de Paris 1830-1833, 1833
The Flâneur
“That kind of man [the flâneur] is a mobile and passionate daguerreotype who retains the faintest traces of things, and in whom is reproduced, with their changing reflections, the flow of events, the city's movement, the multiple physiognomy of the public mind, the beliefs, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd.”
Victor Fournel, Ce qu 'on voit dans les rues de Paris, 1858
The Flâneur
“. . . we like to pose, to make a spectacle of ourselves, to have a public, a gallery, witnesses to our life. So profit from this Parisian mania in order to enrich your album with sketches, your notebooks with remarks, and your cerebral portfolios with observations.”
Alfred Delvau, Les plaisirs de Paris, 186
Baudelaire & Lyric Poetry
Memory and experience (Erfahrung) vs. isolated experience (Erlebnis)
Bergson & Proust on memory
Modern condition: isolates events and experience → “increasing atrophy of
experience” 316
Freud, shock, and protection against stimuli → lends incidents the character of
an isolated experience (Erlebnis] → decline of lyric poetry
Shock and Baudelaire’s personality and art
Close connection of shock and contact with urban masses
“The masses were an agitated veil, and Baudelaiere vuiews Paris through this veil” (323)
The “stigmata” inflicted upon love by the city
The gaze of the object of love unique to city dwellers” (324)
Shock and Baudelaire’s personality and art
Close connection of shock and contact with urban masses
“The masses were an agitated veil, and Baudelaiere vuiews Paris through this veil” (323)
The “stigmata” inflicted upon love by the city
The gaze of the object of love unique to city dwellers” (324)
Baudelaire’s ambivalence: dissociation and accomplice (326)
For B. the person of the cowd is equated with the “flaneur”
Individual anxiety and social mechanisms of comfort
Technologies: match, telephone, camera.
“technology subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training
(328)
Workers at their machines Gambling
Correspondences, through which B was able “to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, as a
modern man, was witnessing….something irretrievably lost” (333)
“”chronological reckoning subordinates duration to regularity” (326)
“scattered fragments of genuine historical experience…the bad infinity of ornament
[from which tradition has been excluded]”(328)
Automation and mechanization of city life
“the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds precisely to the experience (Erfahrung) which, in the case of an object, inscribes itself in long
practice” (327)
Technology disrupts the auratic experience “reduces the imagination’s scope for play (Spielraum) 237
Imagination and desires that have the beautiful as their intended fulfilment
Automation and mechanization of city life
Crisis of artistic reproduction and the crisis of perception
“the expectation aroused by the gaze of the human eye is not fulfilled” (339)
“eye of the city dweller is overburdened with
protective functions” (241)