French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Buchs, L'écriture du réel. Baudelaire et le réalisme scriptural
Poetry and Poetics
Arnaud Buchs,
L'écriture du réel. Baudelaire et le réalisme scriptural,
Galilée, collection "Lignes fictives", 2019. EAN13: 9782718609843.
The mid-19th century was marked by a crisis of reality, crystallizing around the emergence of the daguerreotype and subsequently photography, which offered the illusion of the mechanical and industrial reproducibility of the real. This crisis of reality was above all a crisis of the image, and one particular work and writing — that of Baudelaire — would embody all its implications, which far transcend what is commonly referred to as "realism".
On the one hand, Baudelaire's aesthetics of the gaze can be read as one of the most virulent critiques of that mimetic "realism" which prevents us from seeing, beneath or beyond the images presented by so many works — novels, paintings, and photographs alike — what is literally at work in the writing of the image. Yet it is precisely within this critique of misconstrued "realism" (represented, in Baudelaire's eyes, by a certain type of painting by Courbet) that a different realism takes shape: as the unthought advent of the real — unthought because it erupts and reveals itself within and through the work itself. From this dual perspective, Baudelaire's writing literally consummates reality in both senses of the word: bringing it to an end in its former acceptation (as a reproducible, pre-existing datum) while simultaneously fulfilling it in its "modern" sense — as an event yet to come, inseparable from its own enactment.
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Table of Contents
Introduction. Realism in Question
I. The Reality of the Image
A Complex Horizon
Niépce and the Pictorial Model
Arago and Daguerre in Pursuit of the Real
Beyond the Visible
Beneath Man, a World Without a Subject
The Knowledge of the Image
A Crisis of Language
II. From One Realism to Another
The Aesthetic Horizon of Modernity
The Realism of the Image (Zola from Image to Image)
From the Realism of the Work to Realism at Work
Baudelaire and Realism
"Landscape" and Poetic Reality
Staging the Poem: Realism Is Indeed Present
This Is Reality
Baudelaire's Realism (at Work)
III. Scriptural Realism
An Ultimate Paradox
Writing Music
Beauty and Truth
The Baudelaire Madness: A Shared Aesthetic
Conclusion. Literature and Reality
Bibliography
Arnaud Buchs situates his study within the complex aesthetic debates of nineteenth-century France, a period profoundly unsettled by the technological rise of photography and mechanical reproduction. By examining how Charles Baudelaire confronted this crisis of the image, the book moves beyond traditional art-historical categories to reconsider the relationship between literature and visual representation. It engages with key figures like Courbet, Daguerre, and Zola to trace a shifting understanding of mimesis, contrasting standard pictorial illusionism with a deeper, modern conception of the artistic medium. This contextualization highlights how nineteenth-century writers and critics grappled with the changing status of truth in art.
The volume offers valuable insights for scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, art history, and aesthetic theory who are interested in the evolution of modern poetic form. By analyzing Baudelaire's texts alongside nineteenth-century visual culture, Buchs addresses enduring questions concerning how literature captures what escapes immediate perception. The study will particularly appeal to readers seeking a rigorous theoretical approach to literary realism, the philosophy of the image, and the ways in which modernity redefined the scope of artistic expression. It serves as a compelling resource for understanding the intricate dialogue between nineteenth-century French poetry and the emerging visual technologies of its time.