Metropolisz/nekropolisz: Baudelaire Párizsa, Benjamin passzázsai
Metropolis/Necropolis: Baudelaire´s Paris,Benjamin´s Passagen

Summary/Abstract: Walter Benjamin´s writings on Baudelaire focus on the latter´s picture of Paris as it appears in his poems included in the notorious volume Les Fleurs du Mal. For Benjamin, the French poet presents us the modern metropolis as a paradigmatic space for any understanding of modern poetry, the implication being that the activity of travelling, and more precisely, of strolling in the "arcades" (Passagen) of Paris, is analogous to that of reading as a form of consumption, while inversely, the modern poet, himself a reader or consumer, must go to the market not so much to buy anything, but rather to sell his labour power in the form of poems. What makes the Benjaminian exegesis unique is its recurrent stress that modern literary marketing is based on the performative or adversive char acter of poetry, its ability to address people, which makes it resemble the ancient genre of epitaphs, all the more so, since, in the middle of the 19th century, the great Parisian cemeteries are themselves no longer external to the realm of the living, but embedded in this rapidly expanding city, and as such, part and parcel of it. Modern poetry is thus situated in the realm of commodities, which itself turns out to be nothing but the realm of the dead, a funerary space, where the appeal to the passer-by is essential for the "survival" of the poet.

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