Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” and the Limits of Mind-Reading
Scott, MC
Date: 1 April 2018
Article
Journal
L'Esprit Createur: a critical quarterly of French literature
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher DOI
Abstract
The position of "L'étranger" at the very beginning of Baudelaire's collection of poèmes en prose gives it the status of a frame: it establishes the terms of the reading contract. This essay reads the text as the dramatization of a kind of interpersonal encounter that is repeatedly described in the prose poems, and that may also be ...
The position of "L'étranger" at the very beginning of Baudelaire's collection of poèmes en prose gives it the status of a frame: it establishes the terms of the reading contract. This essay reads the text as the dramatization of a kind of interpersonal encounter that is repeatedly described in the prose poems, and that may also be programmed by these texts: an encounter that ostensibly confirms but tacitly contests the mind-reader's powers of inference. This reading is supported by reference to two previously overlooked intertexts: Arsène Houssaye's Le roi Voltaire (1858) and Gustave Merlet's 1858 critique of this biography.
French
Collections of Former Colleges
Item views 0
Full item downloads 0