Isaac Nowell

In search of Jeanne Duval: The Baudelaire Fractal, by Lisa Robertson, reviewed

The painted-over figure of Baudelaire’s muse eventually emerging from Courbet’s great canvas provides one of many haunting images in this complex novel

Detail of Gustave Courbet’s ‘The Artist’s Studio’ showing Charles Baudelaire reading and ghostly figure of Jeanne Duval to the left of his head. [Getty Images] 
issue 19 August 2023

The shared etymology of the words ‘text’, ‘textile’ and ‘texture’ – from the Latin verb textere, ‘to weave’ – has long been a fertile subject, its thread running through the work of theorists such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze (from whom one of the epigraphs for this book is taken) and others.

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