Baudelaire Contra Benjamin by Guan Beibei;Cristaudo Wayne;

Author:Guan, Beibei;Cristaudo, Wayne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

For Benjamin, Marx had disclosed the “essence” of what constituted the reality which informed the culture, thereby providing a vantage point for making sense of the fragments and “intention-less” elements of the world that are there and that Benjamin was so brilliant at identifying. On the other hand, Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences provided an example of how to match the essence with its substantiated appearances. What had been an aesthetic device with Baudelaire, becomes a tool of political didacticism and sociocultural criticism in the purpose of political redemption.

We have mentioned that many artists of the twentieth century “bought” this story of salvation, many even in its Leninist-Stalinist forms. But the best, including many who saw Stalin’s Soviet Union as preparing the way for future salvation, also violated all the aesthetic restrictions of the orthodoxy of “socialist realism.” Benjamin is, in this respect, analogous to other Marxist artists of his time who all supported the Soviet Union but whose art was the antithesis of socialist realism: Brecht; surrealists, such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard; and even Tristan Tzara, one of the most important members and founders of Dadaism. Lukács was one of the few important non-Soviet Marxist critics who resolutely opposed the anti-realist aesthetic.

The tension between communist orthodoxy and art and criticism was always going to explode, with the types and practices of those involved being too different. Nevertheless, outside of the party, literary theory that wanted to be political had to deal with a major obstacle, an obstacle which has subsequently been obliterated: the plain meaning of the text. It is no accident that the politicization of literary theory goes hand-in-hand with an increasingly sophisticated theoretical language which has to be learnt before the text can become an object of critique.

We commenced this chapter with a brief discussion of Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? and the elevated role of the reader, the literary critic. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, whether it was Fish, or Raymond Williams’s cultural Marxism, Barthes’s or Kristeva’s application of structuralism, de Man’s new criticism, Foucault’s identification of the episteme and discursive regimes in which authors were ensnared, Derrida’s deconstructionism, or any one of countless feminist or identity critiques of literature, the canonicity of authorship was seen not only as boring, but irrelevant—except for the new canon that was being established along lines of political aesthetics. What mattered was the “real” social and political meaning and value of a work, and the power relationships it expressed. It was in this context, that Benjamin, along with Adorno and other cultural Marxists, went from being an inspiration for a small circle of critics to becoming major figures in a new canon.

There is in this a very serious question accompanying this shift in the role of literature: who are the real literary authorities, or teachers? And what are their lessons? The fact is that the authorities and teachers are no longer Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, Blake, Homer, Dante, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.