Writer of Modern Life

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis. Michael W. Jennings is Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton University. Howard Eiland is an editor and translator of Benjamin’s writings. Rodney Livingstone is Professor Emeritus in German Studies at the University of Southampton. He is well known as a translator of books by Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Weber, among others.

In these essays, written in the 1930s, German critic Benjamin masterfully succeeds in changing our perception of French poet Charles Baudelaire as a late Romantic dreamer. Instead, he shows Baudelaire to be a thoroughly modern writer involved in a life-and-death struggle with that urban commodity, capitalism, which had begun to emerge in Paris in the 1850s. Benjamin portrays Baudelaire as a flaneur--a stroller who roamed the lonely Paris streets lost in the faceless crowd--as well as a lone modern hero searching for a means of selling his poetry. In the urban crowds, all traces of individuality are erased, and Baudelaire's famed "spleen" is actually disgust at that defining aspect of the modern condition. Indeed, in "The Painter of Modern Life," an essay Baudelaire wrote in 1863, he makes several acute observations about his sense of alienation that definitely establish him as a modern writer. Stimulating reading.

• Introduction, by Michael W. Jennings Baudelaire Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire Central Park On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Notes Index