Baudelaire, Emerson, and the French-American Connection

Dudley M. Marchi received his PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. He has been a faculty member of North Carolina State University since 1989 and is currently Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Associate Department Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on European and American literature in historical and cultural contexts. He has published articles and book reviews on such authors as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire and Michel de Montaigne and a book, Montaigne among the Moderns: Receptions of the Essais. His teaching focuses on masterpieces of Western literature, French literature, history and culture and second-language acquisition.

«Bridging the gap between the ‘vieux continent’ and the new world order along lines of geography, esthetics, and poetics, this study offers intriguing insights into transatlantic echoes of the last two centuries. Readers will be taken not only by the provocative juxtaposition of Baudelaire and Emerson, but by this study’s breadth, leaving practically no stone unturned between nineteenth-century French and American poetry and twenty-first century students in North Carolina. All the while, we follow the central question of the individual in society, that essential query that is no less relevant in today’s postmodern moment than it was to Baudelaire’s poetic subject at advent of the modern world.» (Professor Seth Whidden, Department of Romance Languages, Villanova University)«Dudley Marchi’s ‘Baudelaire, Emerson, and the French-American Connection: Contrary Affinities’ presents a compelling analysis of the complex love/hate relationship between France and the US from the nineteenth century to the present day. Through careful readings of Baudelaire’s and Emerson’s poetry and essays, Marchi establishes unexpected and revealing connections between these influential authors while at the same time highlighting social and cultural points of intersection (and divergence) that extend from the 1840s to today, moving from Baudelaire and Emerson to Sarkozy and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This comparative, interdisciplinary study of the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of French and American modernity provides important insights on the construction of the individual subject within the larger context of transatlantic and intercultural studies. This book brings new light to contemporary issues of French-American relations with deep intelligence and originality.» (Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin)