Reading the Look and Looking at Reading in Baudelaire

Author: Scott, Maria C.

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

Publication date: 2009-04-01

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Each volume consists of four issues, published in January, April, July and October of each year. Its 1000+ annual pages are divided roughly equally between articles, predominantly on medieval and modern literature in the languages of Europe, and over 500 reviews of books in these areas. All contributions are in English, and each section is edited by a noted scholar in the field, under the overall supervision of the General Editor. Articles are chosen not only for their scholarly worth and originality but also, as far as possible, for their potential interest to a wider readership in other disciplines.