a

3. Emma Dreiser

4. TD& Emma Dreiser

5. Theresa Dreiser

6. http://www.library.upenn.edu/collectio
ns/rbm/photos/dreiser/442-2.html

8. https://sites.google.com/site/dreisermck/home/

9. Wells Street Station (1904)

10. Fifth Ave.

11. Wholesale & Shopping District

12. Fair Department Store

13. Fair Department Store

14. Marshall Field

15. Marshall Field

17. Rector’s Restaurant

18. Rector’s Restaurant

19. http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/swanberg/swa-13.html

20. http://www.library.upenn.edu/collection
s/rbm/photos/dreiser/442-1.html

21. Hannah & Hogg’s Saloon (CHI)

22. Subjects: Exterior of McVicker's Theatre
Place: 25 W. Madison St., Chicago, Illinois

23. Palmer House Hotel

24. Nick, the Dreiser Dog 

29. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

30. Walter Benjamin
(1892-1939)
“On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire” (1939)

31. Benjamin on Baudelaire
Themes:
Decline of lyric poetry
The modern situation (esp. urbanism)
Consciousness-shock-modernity

32. Benjamin on Baudelaire
“Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges
into the crowd as into a reservoir of
electric energy. Circumscribing the
experience of the shock, he calls this man
'a kaleidoscope equipped with
consciousness'“
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939

33. Benjamin on Baudelaire
Themes:
Decline of lyric poetry
The modern situation (esp. urbanism)
Consciousness-shock-modernity
“Aura”

34. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
Bohemians
vs.
Dandys

35. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
The dandy must have “no profession
other than elegance... no other status,
but that of cultivating the idea
of beauty in their own persons... The
dandy must aspire to be sublime
without interruption; hemust live and
sleep before a mirror.”

36. Albert Camus on the dandy
“he can only be sure of his
own existence by finding it in
the expression of others‘
faces. Other people are his
mirror. A mirror that quickly
becomes clouded, it's true,
since human capacity for
attention is limited. It must
be ceaselessly stimulated
,spurred on by provocation.”

37. Albert Camus on the dandy
“The dandy, therefore, is
always compelled to astonish.
Singularity is his vocation,
excess his way to perfection.
Perpetually incomplete,
always on the fringe of things,
he compels others to create
him, while denying
theirvalues. He plays at life
because he is unable to live

38. Baudelaire, Fleurs de Mal (1857)
One creature only is most foul and false!
Though making no grand gestures, nor great
cries,
He willingly would devastate the earth
And in one yawning swallow all the world;
He is Ennui! with tear-filled eye he dreams
Of scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.
Reader, you know this dainty monster too;
- Hypocrite reader, - fellowman, - my twin!

39. Baudelaire, Letters to His Mother, dated December 30,
1857
“I have fallen into a ceaseless nervous terror,
with frightful sleep, frightful awakenings, and
can do nothing. My copies lay a whole month on
the table before I found the courage to put them
in envelopes… How hard it is, not to think a
book, but to write it without weariness. […] I feel
an immense discouragement, a feeling of
unbearable isolation, an entire distrust of my
strength, a total lack of desires, inability to find
any amusement whatsoever. The odd success
of my book and the quarrels it has stirred up
interested me for a while, and then I relapsed…
I constantly ask myself, What use is this? What
use is that? This is the true spirit of spleen.”

40. The Flâneur
“The only, the true sovereign of Paris
I will name for you: he is the
flâneur.”
A. Bazin, L'Epoque sans nom, esquisses de
Paris 1830-1833, 1833

41. The Flâneur
“That kind of man [the flâneur] is a mobile and
passionate daguerreotype who retains the
faintest traces of things, and in whom is
reproduced, with their changing reflections,
the flow of events, the city's movement, the
multiple physiognomy of the public mind, the
beliefs, antipathies, and admirations of the
crowd.”
Victor Fournel, Ce qu 'on voit dans les rues de Paris, 1858

42. The Flâneur
“. . . we like to pose, to make a spectacle of
ourselves, to have a public, a gallery,
witnesses to our life. So profit from this
Parisian mania in order to enrich your album
with sketches, your notebooks with remarks,
and your cerebral portfolios with
observations.”
Alfred Delvau, Les plaisirs de Paris, 186

43. Baudelaire & Lyric Poetry
Memory and experience (Erfahrung) vs.
isolated experience (Erlebnis)
Bergson & Proust on memory
Modern condition: isolates events and
experience → “increasing atrophy of
experience” 316
Freud, shock, and protection against
stimuli → lends incidents the character of
an isolated experience (Erlebnis] →
decline of lyric poetry

44. Shock and Baudelaire’s personality and art
Close connection of shock and contact
with urban masses
“The masses were an agitated veil, and Baudelaiere
vuiews Paris through this veil” (323)
The “stigmata” inflicted upon love by the city
The gaze of the object of love unique to
city dwellers” (324)

45. Shock and Baudelaire’s personality and art
Close connection of shock and contact
with urban masses
“The masses were an agitated veil, and Baudelaiere
vuiews Paris through this veil” (323)
The “stigmata” inflicted upon love by the city
The gaze of the object of love unique to
city dwellers” (324)

46. Baudelaire’s ambivalence: dissociation and accomplice (326)
For B. the person of the cowd is equated
with the “flaneur”
Individual anxiety and social mechanisms of comfort
Technologies: match, telephone, camera.
“technology subjected the human
sensorium to a complex kind of training
(328)

47. Workers at their machines Gambling
Correspondences, through which B was able “to fathom
the full meaning of the breakdown which he, as a
modern man, was witnessing….something irretrievably
lost” (333)
“”chronological reckoning subordinates duration to
regularity” (326)
“scattered fragments of genuine historical
experience…the bad infinity of ornament
[from which tradition has been
excluded]”(328)
Automation and
mechanization of city life

48. “the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds precisely to the
experience (Erfahrung) which, in the case of an object, inscribes itself in long
practice” (327)
Technology disrupts the auratic experience “reduces the
imagination’s scope for play (Spielraum) 237
Imagination and desires that have the
beautiful as their intended fulfilment
Automation and mechanization of city life
Crisis of artistic reproduction and the
crisis of perception
“the expectation aroused
by the gaze of the human
eye is not fulfilled” (339)
“eye of the city dweller is
overburdened with
protective functions” (241)