Baudelaire and historical time, or, the limits of allegorical reading

This essay engages with lyric poems by Baudelaire as a means of probing the limits of allegorical-political reading. Critically confronting, and to some degree recoding, Theodor Adorno's practice of allegorical-dialectical interpretation, the essay seeks alternative, abstract, non-allegorical logics of historical time within Baudelaire's verse. These are located in both moments of paradoxical stasis – the apparent negation of time and forward movement – and in instances of sudden material impact, neither easily recuperated in an allegorical reading. The essay distinguishes its distinctive formalism from deconstruction, and, in conclusion, its interpretive procedures are tested against those of Fredric Jameson, perhaps the most distinguished inheritor of the allegorical-political tradition of literary critical reading.