Reviews for The Misanthrope (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)

The average rating for The Misanthrope (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-04 00:00:00 Rosanna Vigil Modernity has changed most of all, and the antiquity it was supposed to contain really presents a picture of the obsolete. As noted the holidays present personal challenges. The rituals and kinship don't connect with me and somehow my Prime member status hasn't yielded a more enriching experience. What this year's Thanksgiving patch did provide was a couple days to sit and read. I worked yesterday and briefly Thanksgiving night but the rest of the time was devoted to brooding, I mean reading. Imagine then the effect of that happy scholar Walter Benjamin writing on spleen and its champion Charles Baudelaire. This isn't a contained book or finished project but rather myriad essays culled from across Benjamin's life and at least two of them are but notes. The early ones are only oblique with reference to the poet. The advent of newspapers and advertising are a tantalizing subject. Prostitution as an endeavor of mass production is also an interesting thought. The course appears corrected in The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire which is more a Marxist textual analysis, the one I suspect many were expecting all along. There is a slight mention of Brecht and then Benjamin retreats. What mediation that is! There is also a remarkable digression on the nocturnal walks of Dickens which I found most engaging.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-11 00:00:00 Wayne Louderback It took a very long time to read but that is because it was a pleasure to read and who rushes through pleasure. (Perhaps too many of us.) I found the discussion of Baudelaire useful, difficult and often even lovely. As Walter Benjamin looks back nearly a century to understand his own time, so I find much in his thoughts helpful not only to better understand and so read, Baudelaire, but also Benjamin. Benjamin, along the way, offers some insights into our own confused/comic/tragic times. I find Benjamin persuasive: Baudelaire is not simply the poet of Modern LIfe, but the poet of the psyche of Modern Life'the last lyric poet before lyric poetry was silenced by incessant noise. ( A condition that defines both Hell and life as we know it.) By Benjamin's time, the notion of modernity lost whatever positive strains it once possessed as it passed from a grim industrial, into the global. Benjamin's radical conception was that it was possible to find in the life of a man and his work, who lived a century earlier, a guide to understand his own time. In the same way, we would profit, by reading Benjamin, dead now for 70 years, to understand something of our urban, if not urbane existence. The shock has not gone away in spite of the cushion of personal digital technology. Niccolo Machiavelli, in another City, in the early 16th Century, wrote: " If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples, there are always the same desires and and the same passions as there always were." Here, as elsewhere, Machiavelli is prophetic. We may transition, but we don't change. Benjamin sought to understand the impact of industrial life on the experience of the urban dweller, we might find him useful in understanding the effects of the digital revolution on our consciousness. Who, I wonder, will be our poet, the one, who in the manner of Baudelaire, manages to see inside the "works," from the privileged position of being on the outside?