symploke

Peter Childs
The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (review)
symploke - Volume 15, Numbers 1-2, 2007, pp. 385-386

University of Nebraska Press

Project MUSE - symploke - The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (review) Project MUSE Journals symploke Volume 15, Numbers 1-2, 2007 The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (review) symploke Volume 15, Numbers 1-2, 2007 E-ISSN: 1534-0627 Print ISSN: 1069-0697 DOI: 10.1353/sym.0.0025 Reviewed by Peter ChildsUniversity of Gloucestershire Debarati Sanyal. The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. 288 pp. Every age gets the writers it deserves, and in Debarati Sanyal's study of Baudelaire, this age gets the poet of ironical counter-violence. In a post 9/11 climate of trauma, Baudelaire is here reread as a writer who not only chronicled the shock of the nineteenth century but expressed opposition to its violent history through the politics of representation and form. A poetics of irony, counter-violence, and critique runs from Baudelaire to other committed ironists who range from Rachilde through Sartre and Camus to Virginie Despentes and in whose writing...