Crowds, Clouds, Politics and Aesthetics, Flipping Again

Authors

  • Esther Leslie

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v23i44-45.8178

Keywords:

Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Sean Bonney, Bohemians, Utopia, avant-garde, shudder, translation

Abstract

This paper seeks an urban poetics under the pressures of flux, polyglot babble and the rise of technoculture. In so doing it traces the intertwinements of aesthetics and politics as they manifest over the last 150 years. Charles Baudelaire’s poetry is characterised as a delirious response to the delirium of capitalist modernity, in which ‘words rise up’, as he puts it, but it is a also a barometer, which measures the degrees of entwinement of aesthetics and revolutionary politics in the subsequent years, for one in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation in the 1930s and in the wild translations of the poet by Sean Bonney in 2008 in the collection ‘Baudelaire in English’.

Downloads

Published

2014-06-21

How to Cite

Leslie, E. (2014). Crowds, Clouds, Politics and Aesthetics, Flipping Again. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 23(44-45). https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v23i44-45.8178

Issue

Vol. 23 No. 44-45 (2013)

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

    1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
    2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
    3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).