Baudelaire: a new poetical ethos

• Grant number: 22/16541-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: April 01, 2023
• End date: March 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Larissa Drigo Agostinho
• Grantee: Larissa Drigo Agostinho
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research is situated between the theory of modern lyric poetry and literary history, it seeks to point out the limits of the first, which conceives poetry as opposed to reality and the second that understands poetry through the sign of crisis or as a symptom of a social crisis. Baudelaire's poetry (mainly the relationship between verse and prose in both Les Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris) will be analyzed trough Walter Benjamin's concept of poetificated (das Gedichtete), seeking to give another contour to the theme of "loss of aura", situating Baudelaire historically but inside literary history, comparing his poetry with his contemporaries, such as Lamartine and Victor Hugo, so instead of talking about crisis, we intend to understand Baudelaire's poetry as a response and opposition to its contemporaries, which leads him to elaborate a new poetic ethos. We will focus our analysis on the transformation that is both thematic and formal, which displaces the role of the poet, the relation between poetry and social life and between the poetic chant and the "people" to which it is addressed; a transformation that concerns above all the function of poetry and its address. In the constitution of this new ethos irony works as a device that calls into question the poetic tradition and produces a new scene of writing and reading where the enunciation itself is called into question. The relevance of this research is to contribute to the current debate in the field, which seems to be divided between the spontaneity of the voice and the first-person enunciation and a notion of technique and form objective or abstract. (AU)