The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary CultureTaking as its point of departure the two poems, "Correspondances" by Baudelaire and "Les correspondances" by Alphonse-Louis Constant, The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture traces the reception and popularization of several key Swedenborgian doctrines in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature and popular culture, notably the doctrine of correspondences. Contrary to what Michel Foucault argued in his early Les mots et les choses, in nineteenth-century France, the word "correspondences" does not denote a break with "representation," at least as it was used by nineteenth-century French writers: rather it is intimately bound up with the taxonomic structures of natural history--and also with the desire to understand the social world in terms of an ordered and controllable totality. Because it crops up in texts we now classify as canonical and also those outside the canon, and because it is so clearly related to notions of literary structure and effect, the word "correspondences" and its transformations in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France offers a vantage point for discerning how artists and writers defined their work both within and against a context of cultures defined as elite, "popular," and even ideological. |
From inside the book
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Page viii
... Baudelaire's Correspondances : Language , Censorship , and Mourning 217 A Volume of Swedenborg under his arm : Baudelaire and Swedenborgianism 220 Fictional Polarities and the Aesthete's Dilemma : Baudelaire's References to Swedenborg ...
... Baudelaire's Correspondances : Language , Censorship , and Mourning 217 A Volume of Swedenborg under his arm : Baudelaire and Swedenborgianism 220 Fictional Polarities and the Aesthete's Dilemma : Baudelaire's References to Swedenborg ...
Page xiii
... Baudelaire's subtle explorations of the limits of of an unchanging language of nature suggested to me that one ... Baudelaire may well tell us something about the conditions under which one may be persuaded to believe that one is not the ...
... Baudelaire's subtle explorations of the limits of of an unchanging language of nature suggested to me that one ... Baudelaire may well tell us something about the conditions under which one may be persuaded to believe that one is not the ...
Page 19
... Baudelaire , whose uses of the term in his prose works appear in connection with references to the work of Fourier , Hugo , Delacroix , and Wagner and seem to tie it to ... Baudelaire's use of the term between tradition and innovation 19.
... Baudelaire , whose uses of the term in his prose works appear in connection with references to the work of Fourier , Hugo , Delacroix , and Wagner and seem to tie it to ... Baudelaire's use of the term between tradition and innovation 19.
Page 20
... Baudelaire's use of the word " correspondances " or refer- ences to Swedenborg to the context of contemporary esotericism . Critics claim quite rightly that " Les correspondances " is aesthetically inferior to Baudelaire's work.5 The ...
... Baudelaire's use of the word " correspondances " or refer- ences to Swedenborg to the context of contemporary esotericism . Critics claim quite rightly that " Les correspondances " is aesthetically inferior to Baudelaire's work.5 The ...
Page 21
... Baudelaire's sonnet , " Correspondances . " For during the de- cades surrounding 1848 , the word played a key role in the increasingly stratified contexts of popular and elite cultures in France . Before 1848 , it pointed to the utopian ...
... Baudelaire's sonnet , " Correspondances . " For during the de- cades surrounding 1848 , the word played a key role in the increasingly stratified contexts of popular and elite cultures in France . Before 1848 , it pointed to the utopian ...
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The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary ... Lynn Rosellen Wilkinson No preview available - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic allegory appears argues avait Balzac Baudelaire Baudelaire's bien borgianism c'est century chapter choses ciel comédie humaine concept consciousness Constant/Lévi contemporary context cousin Pons Descartes Dieu divine doctrine of correspondences Dogme et rituel dreams Edgar Poe eighteenth eighteenth-century Eliphas Lévi Emanuel Swedenborg emphasizes esoteric esotericism esprit essay être études evoke fait France freemasonry French Heaven and Hell homme human importance individual intellectual interpretation of Swedenborgianism Jesper Swedberg Jonsson journal kind L'histoire l'homme La comédie humaine Le cousin Pons Leibniz literary livre Louis Lambert magic Mesmeric Revelation Mesmerism monde mystique narrative narrator nineteenth nineteenth-century notion novel occult origins parallels Paris passage pensée Pernety philosophical poem poet political popular culture published qu'il references to Swedenborg represent representation rituals role scientific Séraphîta Séraphîta-Séraphîtüs social society structures suggests Sweden Swedenborg's doctrine Swedenborgian doctrines Swedenborgianism Swedish texts theory of language tion tout tradition universal language visionary visions word writers