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  • The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form
  • Nicole Fayard
The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form. By Debarati Sanyal. Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. ix + 276 pp. Hb £40.00.

'Can literature offer a space for a critique of violence?' (p. 2) In answer to this question central to the introduction, this volume provides an account of Baudelaire's poetry and the literary current of modernism as an active critique of historical modernity and a challenge to the violence it breeds. Its opening claim is that there is a need to transcend the widespread tendency to theorize modern literary works as passive responses to the trauma of history, since this approach privileges crisis over critique and diminishes the critical power of representation. It is therefore urgent to recover the contestatory potential of literary experience. Baudelaire's poetry, Debarati Sanyal argues, 'teaches us how to read and resist historical violence, particularly in periods of crisis that aim to co-opt or short-circuit more direct forms of dissent' (p. 4). With the relations between literary form, historical violence and commitment as its central preoccupation, the book looks to the more rebellious and political dimensions of Baudelaire's aesthetic and its legacy. The Violence of Modernity is divided into two sections that straddle literary analysis, theories of cultural production and gender studies. Part 1 opens with a theoretical analysis of how irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity and formalism in Baudelaire's aesthetic produce a form of critical counterviolence with which to challenge the [End Page 90] cultural and political orthodoxy (Chapter 1). Detailed and lively readings from Le Spleen de Paris illustrate how Baudelaire used irony to contest the latent violence of urban and political modernity under the Second Empire. For example, 'La Corde' is read as a virulent critique of an order ruled by the logic of the market (Chapter 2). Sanyal likewise construes Baudelaire's notoriously ambivalent staging of the female body as an ideological tool against the violence of material conditions of production under capitalist modernity, and against the way modernity constructed gender and racial categories (Chapter 3). Part 2 examines Baudelaire's legacy through careful readings of the work of Rachilde, Virginie Despentes and Albert Camus, three 'Baudelairean "committed ironists"' (p. 5) who may also offer self-conscious critiques of modernity. Rachilde's figure of the dandy and Despentes's abject women in Baise-moi open up spaces for resistance by making visible the construction of gender categories, as well as highlighting the cultural conditions that determine relations of power (Chapter 4). A more original aspect of this section is Sanyal's intertextual readings of these authors with Baudelaire. The final chapter examines Camus's ironic meditations on the links between art, history and terror, and his post-war vision of Europe's collusion with the logic of extermination in L'Homme révolté and La Chute. This is a thought-provoking and carefully researched study which offers a captivating perspective on Baudelaire's poetry. Sanyal writes that her book was partly informed by discussions with her students. This is reflected in its construction and the occasionally repetitive nature of its argument. Nevertheless, The Violence of Modernity is lucidly written and a valuable contribution to the body of work on Baudelaire. [End Page 91]

Nicole Fayard
University of Leicester
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