Walter Benjamin and the concept of modernity in the essays on Baudelaire

• Grant number: 17/06912-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: August 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Sérgio Repa
• Grantee: Lucas Melo Souza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 14/11611-3 - Public sphere and reconstruction: on the constitution of a reconstructive paradigm within Critical Theory, AP.TEM

Abstract

The present project seeks to define the contours and specificity of the concept of modernity in the work of Walter Benjamin, outlined in the 1930s, especially in the essays on the French poet Charles Baudelaire. It seeks to look for the constellation in which the concept of modernity in "The Paris of the Second Empire in the work of Baudelaire" (1938) is configured and in "On some motives in the work of Baudelaire" (1939). It endeavors to determine the own inflections that this concept assumes in each text, using as necessary other fundamental works of the author and the broad tradition in which he is inserted, critical theory and its main lines of thought. Therefore, are privileged here those moments of Benjamin's work in which the concept of modernity is emphatically named, especially in the first essay on Baudelaire. At the same time, it is indispensable that the search for the concept of modernity should take into account the second essay on Baudelaire, since it is a revision of the first text at the request of the Institute of Social Research, presenting the concept of modernity in a new constellational arrangement, integrating and re-elaborating both elements of the 1938 text and themes from other works of the 1930s. (AU)