Marina van Zuylen On Teaching Baudelaire

Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard, appeared in a session hosted by the Teagle Foundation as part of a workshop series on methods to strengthen general education. Van Zuylen speaks about how she has taught Charles Baudelaire’s “The Bad Glazier” throughout the years, and how those teaching approaches have shifted as the needs of her students have changed over the past 20 years. “This is a wonderful text because it introduces us to so many questions,” said van Zuylen. “For me this text was a perfect example of art as an escape… It’s an escape because, it’s also a text about maybe the quality of desire, the quality of when we act for reasons that we don’t ourselves understand and this is something that is so exciting about literature. Only in literature, maybe, can we get this sense that characters act in a way that is forbidden in real life.”

Post Date: 12-16-2024