Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura

2007 simultaneously marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Les Fleurs du mal, the founding work of modern poetry, and the 140th anniversary of the death of Charles Baudelaire, who is unanimously considered to be the first theoretician of aesthetic modernity.

This conference not only celebrates these dates, but also aims to offer an opportunity for a wide-ranging critical reflection on the posterities of the modern. It brings together a significant selection of Portuguese and foreign specialists around the emblematic figure of Baudelaire.

Taking the issues of modernity raised by Baudelaire and his work in poetry and as an art critic as its point of departure, the conference also aims to challenge the very idea of modernity.

This explains the interest in papers on a broad variety of themes, from questions of identity to phenomena of fashion and the media, and on some of the figures that were part of Baudelaire’s own posterity. Therefore, the conference will be multidisciplinary, aiming to probe the processes of continuity and rupture in constructing the modern, and ranging from aesthetic to

political modernity. The concept of the modern and modernity – located between affirming the incompleteness of its underlying project to bring freedom and proclaiming the end of the history that created it – is still operational in designating the way in which societies reflect on themselves, portray themselves, dialogue and discuss the major problems that they face. At the dawn of the 21st century, it has become clear that the tools that freed modern societies were simultaneously tools that repressed other societies and brought an internal violence that also contributed to the destruction of the ecosystem.

around us. By discussing the euphoria and dystopia that are a sign of modern forms of expression, this conference also aims to reflect on the future paths of modernity within the context of the new global cosmopolitanism, and on its challenges and restraints.

Jorge Fazenda Lourenço
Isabel Capeloa Gil