Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan

by Ulrich Baer

In a bold reassessment, this book analyzes the works of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, two poets who frame our sense of modern poetry and define the beginning and end of modernity itself.The two poets share a feature that seems to block their placement in such an easy chronological or historical each accounts for an experience that will not fully enter memory, but dissipates in the mind in the form of trauma, fragments, and shock. While Baudelaire, as Paul Valéry was the first to show, explores the trauma of the minute personal shocks of everyday existence in modern life, Celan engages with the catastrophic magnitude of the Holocaust and how it has altered our understanding of history. Can we relate the shocks registered in Baudelaire€™s poems to the historical horror addressed in Celan€™s work without denying either the singularity of suffering and loss or the uniqueness of the historical event of the Shoah?Drawing on trauma studies and Holo

360 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University, and the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Humboldt and other awards, An author, translator, editor, and podcaster, he has published, among other titles: Rilke's "Letters on Life," Rilke's "The Dark Interval: Letters of Loss, Grief and Transformation," "Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma," "110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11," "Beggar's Chicken: Stories from Shanghai," the novel "We Are But A Moment," "What Snowflakes Get Right: Speech, Equality and Truth in the University," "Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts" (with Smaran Dayal).

He's also published museum catalog on a range of photographers, and published and introduced top-quality and well-priced editions of The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Prophet, Jane Eyre, Mrs. Dalloway, Pride and Prejudice, stories by E. A. Poe, as well as Wilde on Love; Dickinson on Love; Rilke on Love; Nietzsche on Love; Shakespeare on Love, all with Warbler Press.

Reviews

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was all very insightful, but it kinda denies my intuitive sense of baudelaire: that he's obscene and hence (to me anyway!) attractive.

I think I belong to his intended audience... most people are shocked by it but I go, hmm how attractive.. I just crave the stimulation...