May 7 – May 28, 2026 | Thursdays, 6:30–9:30 PM EST 📍 Cambridge Community Center, 5 Callender St, Cambridge, MA $302
The Brook Farm Institute for Critical Studies (BFI) offers graduate style seminars both online and in-person for curious adults of all ages and backgrounds across a wide range of subjects. First published in 1857 to scandal and a court order demanding the removal of several poems, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains one of the most provocative and enduring works of modern poetry. In this four-week seminar, we read the collection in Richard Howard's award-winning translation alongside the French original (no knowledge of French required), tracing how Baudelaire transformed lyric poetry's relationship to urban life, desire, memory, boredom, and alienation. We examine the figure of the flâneur, the ethics of a world without God, and the possibility of art under capitalism — drawing on responses from Walter Benjamin, Sartre, Barthes, T.S. Eliot, and others.
Instructor: Isabel Sobral Campos