The idea of prose as modernist poetics

The dissertation examines the emergence and persistence of the idea of prose as modernist poetics. The opening chapter confronts the metaphorical status the notion of "prose" acquires in modernism, and presents a strategy required in order to supply "prose" with conceptual and historical content.; Chapter Two investigates late Baudelaire's attempt to make prose into a rigorous artistic medium. After examining aesthetic and historical reasons behind this development, I argue that in Baudelaire this project---"the idea of prose"---overflows the limits of the imitation of poetic effects in prose, and brings about a fundamental shift in the strategy of representing extra-aesthetic material in the work of art.; Chapter Three places the modernist idea of prose in the framework of historical and systematic relationships between Romanticism, traditional aesthetics and the discourse of universal history. Friedrich Schlegel pioneered the theoretical usage of the term "prose" in his critique of the Enlightenment aesthetics. After establishing the pattern of interplay between formalism and historicism in Schlegel, I refer to Michelet as another crucial figure in the reevaluation of the category of prose. This reevaluation prepared the ground for Flaubert's and Baudelaire's use of "prose" to signify the anti-generic thrust of their poetics and to vindicate the necessity of formal innovation in terms set by a narrative of world history.; Chapter Four studies the high modernist stage in the development of the idea of prose. I argue that Benjamin's adage "The idea of poetry is prose" does not only judge Romanticism, but orients Benjamin's own critical practice as well. Benjamin's attempt to "re-invent criticism" in 1929 mobilizes the "idea of prose" in order to recapture the avant-garde's critical momentum. This project yields Benjamin's conceptualization of the history of photography in his "Short History of Photography." The presentation of Walker Evans as an heir to the "idea of prose as modernist poetics" builds on the convergence between Benjamin's "Short History of Photography"(1932) and Walker Evans's "Re-appearance of Photography"(1932). Evans's re-actualization of the idea of prose culminated in the cathartic practice of photography that redeployed literary modalities of constructing historical experience first introduced by Flaubert and Baudelaire.