The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most
canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an
aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of
modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the
trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over
critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary
experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining
Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention
toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence,
specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France.
Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks
of modernism--irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and
formalism--to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire
and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and
resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy
tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative
readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that
contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of
complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new
account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him
both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's
sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma.
Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later
chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his
strategies--including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and
Jean-Paul Sartre--to examine the relevance of their interventions for
our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that
underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary
engagements with the violence of modernity.
