Critical Summaries

• Proposes "historical" as the correct opposite of "modern" (not "ancient"/"traditional"/"classical"/"romantic")--145
• Nietzsche (in Second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung): "The ability to experience life in a nonhistorical way [is] the most important and most original of experiences." Forgetting the past ("when all anteriority vanishes") leads to spontaneity, action, genuine humanity--146-147 
• De Man calls this experience the quintessence of the "modern"--147
• "Literature has always been essentially modern" because "the temptation of immediacy is constitutive of a literary consciousness"--151-152
• Baudelaire's essay "Le peintre de la vie moderne" bears "an acute sense of the present as a constitutive aspect of all aesthetic experience." In Baudelaire, "The human figures that epitomize modernity are defined by experiences such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of perception that results from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a past that has not yet had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception." Baudelaire: artist must be "always, spiritually, in the state of mind of the convalescent"--156-157
• Baudelaire: "La mémoire du présent" as something that is at risk if one gets absorbed in the past--157 

•  "Modernity and history relate to each other in a curiously contradictory way that goes beyond antithesis or opposition." "Modernity becomes a principle of origination and turns at once into a generative power that is itself historical"--150-151
• Example from literature: "Never is Baudelaire as close to his predecessor Rousseau as in the extreme modernity of his latest prose poems, and never is Rousseau as tied to his literary ancestors as when he pretends to have nothing more to do with literature." 
• This contradiction makes up "the distinctive character of literature" (162). See below.

• Calls into question the "specificity" of literature "as an existing entity susceptible to historical description." In truth, literature "both betrays and obeys its own mode of being": You want to escape from literature and from history. The venue in which you do this is literature (and history).--163-164.
• The problem with structuralism/formalism as a way of reading literature: "If literature rested at ease within its own self-definition, it could be studied according to methods that are scientific rather than historical"--but it doesn't. In fact there is "the fluctuating movement of aborted self-definition"--in other words, modernity--which structuralism/formalism denies.--164

Personally interesting: "Fashion (mode) can [...] be [...] what remains of modernity after the impulse has subsided, as soon [...] as it has changed from being an incandescent point in time into a reproducible cliché[....] Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place" (147)

De Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• The "heresy of didactism [in art]" and its corollaries: heresies "of passion, of truth and morality" (203). Suggests these occur in overabundance in the poetry of antiquity. Advocates l'art pour l'art
• The paradox of modernism, in forms that will later be somewhat echoed by De Man: Progress as a mere refinement of sensual pleasure that sharpens suffering--"a conquest lost again at every minute, a form of progress that is a constant negation of itself" (194); exalts the "primitive man" as displaying "an inventive faculty that we have long since lost": "Can we really compare our lazy eyes and our stopped-up ears to those eyes that pierce the mist, to those ears that could hear the grass growing?" (196)
• The unity of the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual senses in art, especially poetry (204-205) -- but also the virtues of distinguishing, as Poe does, "intellect, taste, and moral sense" (198)
• Poetry as about the aspiration to a higher (spiritual) form of beauty--205
• The poet's heightened irritability, as derived from sensitivity--quotes Poe--201
• Poe's "perfection of the structure" (198) through rhyme, rhythm and "[adapting] [these] to feeling"--"making means correspond with effects" (202); Poe "add[ed] a new element to [rhyme]": "strangeness, which is like the indispensable condiment of all beauty (207) . . . Baud. stresses re: formal details that "there are no minutiae" in poetry (206)
• Poe's notion of the imagination as queen of the faculties: able to apprehend "the secret relation of things, of the correspondences and analogies" in a way that philosophy cannot--199
• Relative merits of short story vs. poem qua medium--199-200
• Poe's and Baud.'s rejection of long or "epic" poems: these lack "unity of impression" and fail to "ravish[] the soul" in an as immediate way as short poetry--202

Personally interesting: Baud. quotes a long tirade of Poe against American women's large purses: "like giant cucumbers [...] [The purse] must be capacious enough for her to be able to put her money, all her money -- and her whole soul -- into it!" (196)

Baudelaire, Charles, and P E. Charvet. Selected Writings on Art and Artists [of] Baudelaire. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Print.