Week 2 (Tues 9/8 and Thur 9/10)
Section outline
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Week 2: The Flâneur
Tues 9/8:
1) Kathryn Kramer, “Person of the Crowd”—2-page review of a 2017 art exhibit titled "Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie" (briefly covers the history of the flâneur by way of Poe and Baudelaire, before turning to contemporary iterations and a review of the exhibit at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia). This is primarily to contextualize the long history of the flâneur and can be read before or after the readings below.
2) Charles Baudelaire, from “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863)—17.5 pages. Focus your time on this reading & see guiding notes below.
3) Charles Baudelaire, 3 short poems (revisit the prose poem "Crowds" from our first day of class, plus another short prose poem "Windows" and a short poem "To a Woman Passing By")
Thur 9/10:
1) Griselda Pollock, from “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”—approximately 7 pages
2) Doreen St. Felix, "The Peril of Black Mobility"—1-page online piece from 2015 (attached as a PDF below)
3) N. K. Jemisin, “The City Born Great” (2016)—19.5 pages, see below for questions you might consider as you read
*bring back to class Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" on Thursday too!
short writing assignment (2 pp.) due Sun 9/13 at 5 pm (upload to Moodle, under "Assignments" tab)
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Here's our schedule of conferences this week! Double check your day and time, and I'll see you then in English House, room 200 (in English House, go up the stairs to the second floor, turn left and go to the very end of the hallway).
This first conference will be short—just 10-15 minutes. There's nothing to prepare!
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These are the first 17.5 pages of Baudelaire’s essay. Section 1 (pp. 1-3) sets up his interest in how art can capture the present (for him, mid-1800s Paris) and starts to establish an idea of beauty as combining the eternal and the “circumstantial” (3) or the momentary. The remaining sections turn to his ideas about the flaneur as an artist who could capture this beauty, primarily within ever-changing metropolitan spaces. He is inspired by both Poe’s "The Man of the Crowd" and by the painter and illustrator Constantin Guys (1802-92). Some things we might think about in the piece: the desire to register the present in art, the role of anonymity, the interest in seeing anew (as a child or as a just-recovered convalescent), Baudelaire's assumptions about gender and class, the relationship between mobility and vision, and whatever else interests you.
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These are images of and by Constantin Guys (Baudelaire's "painter of modern life") that are included at the end of The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon book edition).
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Excerpts from Griselda Pollock's influential 1988 scholarly book Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and the Histories of Art. We'll be reading pp. 93-100 from chapter 3, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity." Pollock's full chapter explores how women Impressionist painters in the mid-to-late 1800s represent urban space differently than male Impressionist painters, but our excerpt theorizes more specifically about gender and Baudelaire's figure of the flâneur.
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Some questions you might consider while reading Jemisin's short story, first published in 2016:
- St. Felix's discussion of the black flâneur.
- What to make of the fantastical notion of embodying a city? Or of somehow merging with a city?
- How do you understand the narrator's claim that "cities really are different. They make . . . a tear in the fabric of reality. . . . As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket . . . (21)." Do you agree?
- Thinking back to Poe's "The Man of the Crowd": What is distinctive about each narrator's experience of/relationship to the city? How might we connect or place into conversation the two stories?
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