Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems exhibit mastery of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance and personal grooming, refined language and leisurely hobbies; every activity pursued with apparent nonchalance. A dandy could be a self-made man in person and persona, who imitated an aristocratic style of life, despite his middle-class origin, birth, and background, especially in the Britain of the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer.
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the work of art, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus how the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire.
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the "Age of Reason" of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century "Enlightenment". Some commentators consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with World War II in 1945, or the 1980s or 1990s; the following era is called postmodernity. The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe, without assigning it to either the modern or postmodern era.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary, or spiritual pursuits. In this context, bohemians may be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds. Bohemian is a 19th-century historical and literary topos that places the milieu of young metropolitan artists and intellectuals—particularly those of the Latin Quarter in Paris—in a context of poverty, hunger, appreciation of friendship, idealization of art and contempt for money. Based on this topos, the most diverse real-world subcultures are often referred to as "bohemian" in a figurative sense, especially if they show traits of a precariat.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), by Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura (uniqueness) of an objet d'art. That in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics. Written during the Nazi régime (1933–1945) in Germany, Benjamin presents a theory of art that is "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art" in a mass culture society.
Flâneur is a French noun referring to a person, literally meaning "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer", but with some nuanced additional meanings. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life.
Michael T. Taussig is an Australian anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. He is best known for his engagement with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. Taussig has also published texts on medical anthropology.
Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it was especially concerned with Paris' iron-and-glass covered "arcades".
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity is a book by Marshall Berman written between 1971 and 1981, and published in New York City in 1982. The book examines social and economic modernization and its conflicting relationship with modernism. The title of the book is taken from Samuel Moore's 1888 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
"The Man of the Crowd" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe about a nameless narrator following a man through a crowded London. It was first published in 1840.
The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." It also exists in a more limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation." Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s.
Franz Hessel was a German writer and translator. With Walter Benjamin, he produced a German translation of three volumes of Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 work À la recherche du temps perdu in the late 1920s.
The badaud is an important urban type from 18th and 19th-century French literature, one that has been adapted to explain aspects of mass culture and modern experience.
"Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades Project—the construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during Haussmannization—appear as leitmotifs in both essays.
One Way Street is an anthology of brief meditations by Walter Benjamin collected and published as a book in 1928. The reflections composing its cycle were mostly written coterminously with the drafting phase of his doctoral thesis The Origin of German Tragic Drama, during his personally transformative though ultimately failed romance with Asja Lācis. Many of the pieces that were published individually prior to their appearance as a collection first ran as feuilleton in newspapers—a critical, artistic, sometimes purely humorous or bizarre space-filling feature of newspaper formats in Europe at the time.
