Reading the Look and Looking at Reading in Baudelaire

Author: Scott, Maria C.¹

Source: The Modern Language Review, Volume 104, Number 2, 1 April 2009 , pp. 375-388(14)

Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract:

This essay examines Baudelaire's treatment of the gaze in his verse and prose poetry. It proposes that the gaze's unavailability to sight in some of his verse may connote a more ethical relation to the other than does the poetic evocation of the other's gaze. It also suggests that the easy legibility that the narrators of Baudelaire's prose poems impute to the eyes of others is rendered suspect by the internal logic of the texts. The fact that these texts themselves resist univocal interpretation suggests that the prose poems theorize their own logic in their representation of the look.

Keywords: Baudelaire; gaze; verse; prose poetry; ethical; other; legibility

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: National University of Ireland, Galway

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