Abstract
Jean-Paul Sartre described Baudelaire as an ‘“aboulic” who was incapable of settling down to regular work’. But Baudelaire’s view of work should be considered with regard to his personal aesthetic and to the socio-political context of nineteenth-century artistic production: although he struggled to reconcile working for the symbolic profit of pleasure with the necessity of making a living, he does not reject work per se. It is this commitment to an alternative view of literary labour that I call the dilettante work ethic. This chapter places Baudelaire’s attitude to work in the context of aesthetics, autonomy and professional ethics, before analysing references to work in his critical writings and representations of the poet as worker in his verse and prose poems.
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Notes
- 1.
Sapiro’s book La Responsabilité de l’écrivain has not yet been translated into English, although versions of different sections have been published in articles. See, for example, Sapiro, ‘The Writer’s Responsibility in France: From Flaubert to Sartre’, French Politics and Society, 25.1 (2007), 1–29.
- 2.
Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own.
- 3.
The source that Meltzer quotes here is a 1958 interview with Bataille about his book La Littérature et le mal [Literature and Evil], which can be viewed here: http://www.ina.fr/video/I00016133 [accessed 27 July 2016].
- 4.
On the subject of Baudelaire’s visits to his mother’s house in Honfleur, see Calasso (55–67).
- 5.
I discuss Baudelaire’s conception of dilettantism at greater length elsewhere (Hibbitt 2006, 77–83).
Works Cited
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——— (1995) The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon.
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Hibbitt, R. (2018). Baudelaire and the Dilettante Work Ethic. In: Waithe, M., White, C. (eds) The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2_8
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