Lecture by Françoise Meltzer (University of Chicago): "Baudelaire's Time"

Speaker(s): Françoise Meltzer (University of Chicago)

This lecture presents a close reading of Baudelaire's "Harmonie du soir" to examine how Georges Poulet, Paul de Man, and others view time and forgetting in Baudelaire.  Meltzer will consider as well Benjamin's “Angel of History,” among other texts on "modernity." The present, she argues, does not exist for Baudelaire; the future is threatening and the past inaccessible. This perspective makes for a double vision of sorts-- the poet cannot see clearly because he consistently confronts two temporal landscapes at once. Such strobismus (or stereo vision) makes for a different poet from the one so famously described by Benjamin. In Meltzer’s reading, Baudelaire is not the writer who founds modernity; rather, he records, but does not necessarily understand, the chaotic scenes around him. It was left to Benjamin and others to "read the photographic plates" that Baudelaire leaves behind. 
 
Françoise Meltzer teaches at the University of Chicago, where she is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department  of Comparative Literature. She is also Professor in the Divinity School, in the Philosophy of Religions, and a co-editor of Critical Inquiry. Her most recent book is Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity (2011).