Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire by Marguerite S. Murphy (review)

Reviews 237 have judiciously collected a number of essays, from scholars both established and emergent, exploring Beckett’s interests in early modern European writers. The publication of Beckett’s reading notes, his reflections on the visual arts, critical descriptions of his personal library, as well as documentation of lecture notes taken by students during his time as an instructor of French at Trinity College Dublin, have been instrumental in identifying Beckett’s lifelong interest in figures such as Racine and Molière. Such sources also solidify the specificity of the explicit references made in his works to Descartes and the post-Cartesian philosophy of Arnold Geulincx. The essays collected in the present volume go beyond this mere documentary identification and begin the process of actually interpreting early modern intertextual references as they shape Beckett’s worldview, stylistics, and literary sensibility. Consequently, these essays are filled with a number of surprising observations, interpretative gestures, and previously unexplored connections.Among the volume’s most illuminating contributions are Carla Toban’s elegant inquiries into “rapports intertextuels probables entre les corpora [de Molière et Beckett], qui y opèrent via Proust” (23), as well as Angela Moorjani’s consideration of Racine’s role in shaping Beckett’s modernism, particularly as he adapts“the Racinian soliloquies à deux”in constructing what she calls“Beckett’s own polyloguing pseudo-couples” (47). Moorjani’s contribution is perhaps the volume’s most theoretically dense, while at the same time its most potentially fruitful, so it comes as something of a generous gift to future scholars when she remarks, regarding“Beckett’s imaginative reshaping”of Racinian structures, that“clearly, more is left to tell” (50). One can only hope that the volume’s fresh insights and new interpretive encounters inspire scholars and critics to accept Moorjani’s challenge. It must be said, however, that not all of the volume’s essays uncover such fruitful new terrain—the considerations of Geulincx’s ethics and of Beckett’s indebtedness to early modern painting are particularly redundant of recent scholarship. And yet there is still more than enough for readers interested in pursuing the early modern influence on Beckett—and indeed on modernist practices as a whole. Whether the point of departure is Racine or Molière, or, as in some of the other stronger essays, Pascal, Shakespeare, or Spenser, there is much to learn from this volume, while inspiring groundwork is laid for what are sure to be exciting new paths in Beckett scholarship. Towson University (MD) Jacob Hovind Murphy, Marguerite S. Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire.Amsterdam: Rodopi,2012.ISBN 97890 -420-3526-3. Pp. 252. $74.25. Recent scholarship has challenged the modernist notion of art’s autonomy and weakened the separation between aesthetic and economic spheres. Critics like Jacques Rancière and Frederic Jameson point to not only the contradiction inherent in the notion of full artistic autonomy, but also to a more heterogeneous condition historically for art as both idea and product. Murphy takes a similar approach, allying with the new economic criticism that sees the relationships between aesthetic and non-aesthetic categories as intertwined and complex. Focusing on nineteenth-century France, where ideological debates about art and money raged, she challenges the canonical understanding of the status of art and literature in modernity by examining the relationship between political economy and aesthetics, the focus on aesthetics in the marketplace and exhibition hall, and Baudelaire’s consciousness of the interconnection of economics and aesthetics in ways that shaped his understanding of art and literature in a new material world of objects. Hence, Murphy’s book challenges not only conventional notions of modernist aesthetics, but also traditional understandings of Baudelaire, the so-called avatar of autonomy, the disillusioned dandy, the role model of social disaffect argued by thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu. Murphy sees the author instead as a spectator keenly aware of art’s new public face, a consumer desirous of both art and goods whose sensibilities cast light not only on his own poetic texts, but also on transformations in the tenor of everyday life and habits of perception.This book is organized in six chapters, with an introduction...