Nathan Brown

Baudelaire's Shadow Nathan Brown

A central, inescapable contradiction runs throughout The Flowers of Evil: to be determining is to be determined. In Baudelaire's Shadow, Nathan Brown elucidates and theorizes this dialectical problem of determination as it works across the spiritual, sexual, metaphysical, social, and aesthetic dramas of Baudelaire's volume. Combining close formal analysis of particular poems with a synthetic grasp of the book as a whole, while developing a philosophical approach capable of grappling with its complex ironies, Brown studies figures of mediation across chapters focused on death, the void, the actuality of the social, and the materiality of the signifier. Each of these thematic and conceptual cruxes, he argues, can be understood in terms of a dialectic of determination?of agency bound up with its negation?functioning at the level of both form and content. Brown shows that such an approach clarifies the stakes of Baudelaire's Romantic Satanism, his treatment of race and eroticism, the conceptual relation between Spleen and Ideal, the significance of ekphrastic representation and apocalyptic imagination, the use of free indirect discourse, and the ambiguity of metaphorical reference. Written as a continuous essay in a style at once poetic and philosophically rigorous, Baudelaire's Shadow sheds new light on The Flowers of Evil and its significance for our understanding of modern poetry and subjectivit
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