![]() ![]() For Benjamin.Julien incorporated these works into “Brutal Beauty,” an exhibition he curated in 2008 at the Serpentine Galleries to celebrate Jarman’s work 14 years after the lauded director’s death. Among the chief questions Jennings raises and discusses in his Introduction is this one: how does Baudelaire's poetry represent capitalist modernity-since Benjamin never suggests (quite to the contrary) that the poet possessed any social or political insight at all or held to a single conviction he was deeply duplicitous and best compared to secret agents, idlers, prostitutes and buffoons.Ī closely related question among those that Jennings treats at the outset bears precisely on Benjamin's re-conception of art's capacity to represent an era, and on the critical practice required to do justice to it. The title of the volume-The Writer of Modern Life-refers to an essay by Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," which claims that an artist's work captures the character of his era and makes it present. His admirable edition emphasizes that Benjamin's great originality as a reader of Baudelaire lies in his analysis of the poet as a striking representative of his age: a figure "scathingly" symptomatic of urban capitalist modernity. It is instructive and a pleasure to read Benjamin's Baudelaire texts in this format, and in the light of Jennings' Introduction. In addition to Benjamin's own notes he provides a very thorough and helpful set of his own, identifying individual writers, artists, politicians, businessmen, inventors whose names figure in the essays, as well as particular books, historical events, cultural objects and trends. ![]() ![]() In The Writer of Modern Life, Michael Jennings presents all of Walter Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire together, in their English translations, for the first rime. ![]() The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. ![]()
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