Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) may be the most influential, and perhaps the greatest, book of lyric poetry in French literature. It is at once Romantic and modernist; it belongs to both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume is the first devoted to a lyric poet who did not write in English, and it seeks to promote the study, teaching, and enjoyment of this intriguing and sometimes troubling French poet.

The collection is divided into two parts. The first, "Materials," lists French and English editions of Baudelaire, surveys courses that teach him, discusses some of the problems of introducing him in the classroom, and recommends readings and audiovisual materials. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," describe institutional contexts in which Baudelaire has been taught (a high school, a church-related university), text-centered approaches to his work (vocabulary, prosody, comparing his verse with his prose poems), and themes of his work (memory, the Devil, irony, ambivalence toward women). Other aspects include the political background and urban reality of his poems, psychoanalytic insights, gender issues, and the use of CD-ROM technology and of hypermedia in courses.