Research Catalog

Title

An atmospherics of the city : Baudelaire and the poetics of noise / Ross Chambers.

Author

Chambers, Ross

Publication

New York : Fordham University Press, 2015.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xiii, 187 pages; 23 cm.

Summary

• "What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates natural beauty and the sublime to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city? An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire's evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder-the city's version of a transcendent atmosphere-as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction. Analyzing this shift, particularly as evidenced in Tableaux parisiens and Le Spleen de Paris, Ross Chambers shows how Baudelaire's disenchantment with the politics of his day and the coincident rise of overpopulation, poverty, and Haussmann's modernization of Paris influenced the poet's work to conceive a poetry of allegory, one with the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader whose senses have long been dulled by the din of his environment. Providing a completely new and original understanding of both Baudelaire's ethics and his aesthetics, Chambers reveals how the shift from themes of the supernatural in Baudelaire to ones of alienation allowed a new way for him to articulate and for his fellow Parisians to comprehend the rapidly changing conditions of the city and, in the process, to invent a "modern beauty" from the realm of suffering and the abject as they embodied forms of urban experience"--
• "An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire's evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder--the city's version of a transcendent atmosphere--as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction"--

Series Statement

Verbal arts: studies in poetics

Uniform Title

Verbal arts--studies in poetics.

Subject

• Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867 > Criticism and interpretation
• Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867
• City and town life in literature
• LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French
• LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Preface -- Part I. Fetish and the Everyday: 1. From the Sublime to the Subliminal: Fetish Aesthetics; 2. The Magic Windowpane -- Part II. Allegory, History and the Weather of Time: 3. Fetishism Becomes Allegory; 4. Daylight Specters: Allegory and the Weather of Time -- Part III. Ironic Atmospherics and the Urban Diary: 5. Ironic Encounters: the Poetics of Anonymity; 6. "La forme d'une ville": the Urban Diary -- Appendix.

Call Number

JFD 15-2217

ISBN

• 9780823265848
• 0823265846

LCCN

2014048447

OCLC

887850712

Author

Chambers, Ross, author.

Title

An atmospherics of the city : Baudelaire and the poetics of noise / Ross Chambers.

Publisher

New York : Fordham University Press, 2015.

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Verbal arts: studies in poetics

Verbal arts--studies in poetics.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

JFD 15-2217