Sightseeing in Paris with Baudelaire and Breton

摘要

In his article \u22Sightseeing in Paris with Baudelaire and Breton,\u22 Benton Jay Komins discusses the tensions between Charles Baudelaire\u27s acts of modern appropriation and André Breton\u27s imaginative seizing of the démodé. While Breton roams the Parisian cityscape with the same aspect of creative gazing as Charles Baudelaire\u27s nineteenth-century dandy, the objects and experiences that he privileges are different from the dandy\u27s fashionable marvels. In texts such as Nadja passé artifacts captivate Breton. Between Baudelaire\u27s revelling in the elegant modern possibilities of dandysme and Breton\u27s imaginative seizing of démodé objects, something significant has occurred: Twentieth-century urbanites like Breton no longer celebrate the experience of the new; rather, they privilege the obsolete, injecting it with inspirational possibilities. Against the cultural frame of Baudelaire\u27s dandy and the social phenomenon of the fetishized commodity, Breton\u27s twentieth-century descriptions of ruined Parisian landmarks, decrepit neighbourhoods, and exhausted everyday objects indeed become political.