• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.17-32
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• 2008

This study focuses on the analysis of Baudelaire's aesthetic perspective which has established a theoretical basis on research of the critical reviews' salon exhibitions as written by Baudelaire. Charles Pierre Baudelaire(1821-1867) having lived during the latter part of Neo-classicism and the era of Romanticism and Impressionism, Baudelaire displayed opposition to customary realities such as social ideology or religious authority that suppressed human nature. Also he pioneered a new genre known as art criticism and wrote much that provided important insights on the essential elements of artistic work, modernity and trend, as well as art definition and art categories. The aesthetic perspective and creative spirit were formed by Baudelaire, during his age were also reconfirmed in the successive ages of modernism and postmodernism. As such, this study sheds light on how Baudelaire's aesthetic perspective was not only temporarily assertion but it is consistently applied to modern art and fashion area. What is more important that, Baudelaire admired new artificial beauty that is created by the human soul liberated from natural instincts or desires. Especially, informed by strangeness and distinctiveness, Baudelaire's view of fashion ran along the same vein as his view of art, and these views form the basis of that creative spirit which situated western fashion on a center of the world. In conclusion, the research on Baudelaire's aesthetic perspective will reaffirm a firm awareness of the creative spirit essential to globally-oriented creative artists and designers who work within the circumstance of the 21st century, a time when the paving of new aesthetic paths is necessary. The research also offers a clear understanding of the aesthetic values demanded by this age.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.143
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• pp.245-266
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• 2017

Walter Benjamin's unique concept of the aura is mainly presented in his three essays, Little History of Photography(1931), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(1935-1939), and On Some Motifs in Baudelaire(1939), whereas the studies on this concept are principally conducted on the basis of the first two essays. But considering Benjamin elaborated the concept through Baudelaire studies, the aura needs to be reexamined on the axis of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire". He approached Baudelaire studies in one of the essential items for The Arcades Project at first. These studies acquired a new prospect soon after he mapped out these studies for an independent book in 1938. His Baudelaire studies come to fruition in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, written one year after The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire(1938). For Benjamin, Baudelaire is not only a poet who sharply testified to the age of the decay of aura, but also the one who elaborated new poetic motifs such as the metropolis, the crowd: the poet searched for his poems in the crowd of the metropolis, by accepting as poetic nourishment all sorts of experiences of the impact of daily occurrunces in Paris. In On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, the aura is defined as the response of a gaze, that is, the capability to gaze on something. It is principally a poetic capacity to give the capability of opening the eyes to an animal, or even to an inanimate object. If a gaze is responded by the other for which the gaze is placed upon, we experience the other's own aura. The media of the mechanical reproduction (such as the photography, the film) give rise to the decay of aura, because the expectation of returning one's gaze becomes frustrated from the outset.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.73-97
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• 2010

Representation of destitution may be considered as an expression of a social desire toward forging a bond or solidarity with the impoverished. However, political and ethical demands of the solidarity force the formulaic framework structuring the form of representation to its limits. The thesis aims to examine the responses to such demands within the tradition of modernist literature that can be traced from Charles Baudelaire, Knut Hamsun to Franz Kafka and that somehow culminates with Samuel Beckett, and to analyze how the issue of destitution that weaves through Beckett's works criticizes and inherits such a heritage. Whereas destitution in 19th century Realism is structurally fixed and its potential for change is inherently excluded, for these writers, destitution is no longer the state of rigid reality in which any possibility is limited. It is destitution as an imperative that calls for exploitation of possibilities that can be recuperated from the impoverished condition of destitution. What these writers consistently resist against is destitution that leads to compensation and reward. Since occupying a superior position toward the other as the subject of description or sympathy can be seen as one form of profit or reward, they have persistently pursued absolute solitariness and austere conditions rather than prematurely simulating a sense of solidarity and community. The ultimate goal of destitution as an imperative is to pursue destitution in order to worsen it by identifying and then excluding and expending possessions and assets to a state of penury. This is a paradoxical process that opens up the realm of possibilities of destitution and redefines it as abundance and wealth. Destitution for Beckett as seen in the writers above is the objective of literature. But, what he focuses on is to amplify the shreds of economic world that still remain in a state of poverty and to reveal extreme poverty as a state of odd affluence and to transform it into a pursuit of accumulation and profit. One of his famous axioms, "less is more", contains the essence of such a paradoxical strategy. In a sense, such approach is a twist on the strategy that identifies and uses any remaining potential hidden in destitution as was pursued by other writers. It also expands on the imagination of the destitute described by Hamsun. But Hamsun and Beckett are diametrical opposites. Unlike Hamsun, Beckett does not link imagination with a sense of guilt. Imagination is not intended to overcome the destitute reality nor to culminate in artistic martyrdom as in the case of Kafka's hunger artist. The imagination of the impoverished in Beckett is simply a hilarious game and not an escape that ends in a sense of guilt. This game formulates a "rhetorical question" or derision at the ironical situation where the pursuit of hunger and art as the disinterestedness has been turned into symbolic capital. It is inherently a fundamental critique at the aestheticization of destitution that has been pursued by Modernism. Beckett's efforts at divulging falsehood inherent in non-profit acts such as charity, donation and hospitality are dissections of social fictions in which aestheticization of destitution remains a part of the whole.