• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.737-742
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• 2023

This paper attempts to analyze how Paris was transformed by Haussman through comparing flaneurs in works by Balzac and Baudelaire. In both writers' works, flâneurs as the emblems of modernity observe Paris, especially architecture. Although representative of modernity, they are ambivalently obsessed with the heritage of the past. Balzac's The Wrong Side of Paris, Godefroid as a male bourgeois, is a flaneur observing antiquated architectures, the heritage of past. In Baudelaire's "The Swan for Victor Hugo" the flaneur passing through the modern Caroussel feels the Old Paris is gone. In "Parisian Dream," illusionary Paris exhibits metopolitan imagery wrought by capitalism led by Napoleon the third. The difference between the two writers demonstrate how Paris was changed by modernity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.719-751
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• 2010

While Lukacs advocated the progressive effect that Darwin's evolutionary theory had on Goethe and Balzac, he was convinced that the "influences of Nietzsche, Freud, or Spengler on the writers" of his own time were "devastating." He maintains that to the "'vacuous' reality" of bourgeois life, "the bourgeois writer counterposes 'the life of the soul,' which is 'alone decisive.' This life of the soul then becomes the centre of gravity, and sometimes the sole content of his portrayal." Naming this creative tendency psychologism, he warns against the danger of "depicting only the 'inner life,' and carrying on a more or less conscious education in the direction of political and social indifferentism, of ignoring and pushing aside the 'inessential,' 'external' struggles of the world, in favour of the 'life of the soul,' which is all that matters." However, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks displays that after all, "the life of the soul" cannot be separated from the "external' struggles of the world." Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which criticizes the conduct of World War I by British leaders and the British society in general with its patriarchal, gender, and class repression by depicting the psychopathology of the shell shock victims of the same war amply shows the possibility of portraying the "external struggles of the world" through the in-depth probing into "the life of the soul" and finding political and social relevance in the process.