Signs on Black Canvas, or Charles Baudelaire’s Aesthetics of Transient Beauty and Creative Melancholy Cover Image

Znaki na czarnym płótnie, czyli o estetyce przemijającego piękna i o twórczej melancholii Charles’a Baudelaire’a
Signs on Black Canvas, or Charles Baudelaire’s Aesthetics of Transient Beauty and Creative Melancholy

Author(s): Magdalena Siwiec
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Charles Baudelaire; melancholy; spleen; blackness; aesthetics of transient beauty; écriture mélacolique

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on Charles Baudelaire’s poetics of negativity which exploits absence, blackness, negation, defectiveness, associated by the poet in a paradigmatic way with melancholy and the aesthetics of transient beauty. The basis of the proposed interpretation is the paradoxical metaphor of luminous blackness (a black sun, a radiance without source, a black star, a black canvas), which the poet exploits in his metatextual works. The paper focuses on poems in which Baudelaire approaches that which is beyond the limits of expressibility and is symbolised by blackness and emptiness. Baudelaire’s melancholic poetry appears as a poetry about poetry, a poetry that is paradoxical in the sense that it contradicts stillness, acedia, and creative stagnation, while retaining its negative dimension, rising up against itself.

  • Issue Year: 2021
  • Issue No: 47
  • Page Range: 25-46
  • Page Count: 22
  • Language: Polish
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