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Generic Baggage: Encountering Other People in "À une passante" and "Les veuves"
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 58, Number 1, Spring 2018
- pp. 8-16
- 10.1353/esp.2018.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Baudelaire's exploitation and challenging of generic conventions have implications for readers' impressions of a text, including their perceptions of the other people with whom the speaker comes into contact. This article explores these issues in relation to two short texts: "À une passante" (a sonnet evoking one of the most celebrated Baudelairean encounters) and "Les veuves" (a poème en prose in which an apparently similar subject is treated very differently). I conclude that generic baggage can be as problematic as the heuristic assumptions we bring to our everyday dealings with other people.