Charles Baudelaire apparaît aujourd'hui comme le premier en date des poètes dits "modernes” et c'est parmi les poètes que le placent les anthologies contemporaines. Mais la renommée et l'influence de la poésie baudelairienne ont tendance à faire oublier le fait que Baudelaire fut également prosateur et que c’est à la prose qu'il dut ses premiers lauriers littéraires. La traduction des "Histoires Extraordinaires" d’Edgar Poe ne fut-elle pas son premier succès, et le plus indiscutable? Néanmoins, l’oeuvre en prose de Baudelaire ne représente qu'environ un quart de son oeuvre publiée — elle souffre donc d'un manque de volume par rapport à son oeuvre en vers et ce premier avantage explique en partie pourquoi elle a moins attire les étudiants et les chercheurs.

From Conclusion: The Artist can regard Baudelaire as a touchstone, as so many of his ideals and maxims are the ideals and maxims of the Artist himself. He teaches us many invaluable secrets of the universe and his lucid rendering of their explanations give us a clear insight into its mystery. He believed that Art was the ‘brainchild’ of Nature’s inspiration and that through its means and ways Natures mysteries will be revealed to us. He fought against all that the modern-day Artist is stiII fighting against. He rebelled against society1s false reasoning and its false morals. He became ‘self-exiled’ so that he could retain his individuality and reasoning. Like the Artist, his most valuable quality was his spontaneity and inspiration, given to him when his spirit moved him. His poems stand complete in themselves and yet all have a mysterious quality binding them. Likewise our paintings must also stand complete, they must be an end in themselves, each with its own singular message and yet a unity must prevaiI throughout. We must strive for that eternal quality that is so obvious in Baudelaire1s work. He can be read today at the distance of a century as if he had written for the present generation, with a knowledge of its problems and interests. His appeal is still vital because he was not fettered by the fashionable opinions and evanescent whims of his own age, and he made no concessions to the spirit of his own time in order to gain popularity.

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This dissertation is devoted to an exploration of Baudelaire's correspondence from the sociopoetic perspective. Elements of form or style in the poet's letters, their unique pragmatics and social dimensions, are primary targets of inquiry. For Baudelaire, as for any epistolier, the writing of letters rests on the author's specific education, the traditions of his time, his philosophy, imagination and economic situation. As it is only through these different "filters" that Baudelaire's particular letter writing can be understood, the first part of this dissertation summarizes the main aspects of the socio-cultural history of epistolary practice in the nineteenth century. The second part focuses on the commerce of letters, what can be called the "economy" of Baudelaire's correspondence, wherein the letter is considered as an object of discourse. This section, which aims throughout to study how Baudelaire understood, considered and managed his own correspondence, also permits a close examination of the characteristic brevity of many of his letters. Without the self-indulgence of a diary, Baudelaire's correspondence is nevertheless related to this genre by the level of introspection it contains. Throughout his letters, for himself and the "Other", Baudelaire was preoccupied with defining his identity; increasingly this effort was concentrated on the creation of a persona, that of the Poet. The third and last part of this dissertation explores the staging and textualization of this ideal self.

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Diss. : Literatur : Freiburg Universität : 1994. / Bibliogr. p. 155-168. Index.

This thesis is dedicated to a in depth study of the notion of pleasure such as it appears in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Focusing upon a very restraint core of poems, the analysis unfurls according to the methodic tools provided by Michael Riffaterre, literary theorician and critic, in his Semiotics of poetry. Basing myself on a shrewd selection of texts, number of which were almost completely left out by baudelairean studies, my goal was to highlight the semiotical span owned by the different illustrations of pleasure in our poet's work. Weaving significant threads, first between signs and then between the text and its intertextuality, I achieved a detailed and global canvas of pleasure's descriptive system as it underlies Les Fleurs du Mal. The analysis defines pleasure's expression as a dichotomic construction. First opposing itself to reality, then to illusion and then to danger and others, it eventually builds itself against the notion of grief through bipolarization, caught into an insolvable cycle overhung by its evanescence. Interpretation allows us to draw interesting perspectives concerning the poet's epistemological choices.

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