Baudelaire. The heroism of the defeated
JUAN ZAPATA

Summary
Baudelaire is not an author for the arrogant. His work irritates, bothers and infuriates anyone who thinks highly of themselves. And with good reason, because that’s exactly what he desired to provoque in his readers. In the repulsive portrait in which he exposed the social and spiritual misery of modern civilization, there was a violent accusation against a society infatuated with itself, and implacable judgment that destroyed all the philanthropic discourses with which men’s insatiable greed is adorned. But Baudelaire also “throws a magical, supernatural light over the natural darkness of things”. From the Evil that he deems irremediable, from that destroyed world that we catch a glimpse in his poems, Baudelaire knew how to pull the beauty that hides behind a hurting humanity, that suffers and weeps for having to stay alive, as if from the fall you could look better at the immensity of the sky.

Data sheet
Category: Essay
ISBN: 978-958-8887-36-4
Publication date: 1/11/2021
Extent: 359
Format: 14 x 20 cm

Author´s biography

Juan Zapata. He has a Ph.D. in French Literature from the Rennes 2 University, France, and from the University of Liège, Belgium. He’s a professor at Lille University and a translator in the sociology of literature area, in which he has translated authors such as Jacques Dubois, Nathalie Heinich, Jérôme Meizoz, Pascal Brissette and Alain Vaillant. He’s been a researcher at the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin (2019), where he studied the cultural transfers between French literature and Latin American literature in the late nineteenth century. He’s been fellow of the Collège européen des traducteurs of Seneffe, Belgium (2013), and the Collège européen de traduction of Looren, Switzerland (2014). He recently directed and translated the collective works La Invención del autor. Nuevas aproximaciones al estudio sociológico y discursivo de la figura autorial (2015), Baudelaire: de la bohemia a la modernidad literaria (2017) and Autorías encarnadas. Representaciones intermediales del autor (2021), with Aina Pérez Fontdevila.