An Atmospherics of the City - (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics) by Ross Chambers (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"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"--<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>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? <p/>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. <p/>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. <p/>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.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"The book, moving seamlessly between close analyses of poems and broader theoretical contextualization, is a model for scholarship in the rigorous and delicate attention it pays to the texture of poems; the ease of move between singular details and universal categories; the depth and clarity of thought expressed in precise prose; deep erudition condensed into concise footnotes that keep to the essential, and the inventive receptivity toward texts that presents a new interface with one of the most canonical authors of the Western culture."<b>-----Claire Lyu, <i>University of Virginia</i></b><br><br>"The title of Ross Chambers' brilliant work encapsulates its central paradox: it defines poetry not as music, but as noise; not as formal order, but as what cuts against it: its atmospherics."<b>-----Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, <i>Vassar College</i></b><br><br>Ross Chambers's argument is an appropriately murky one that centres on Baudelaire's awakening to 'noise' - 'alienating din, steady background hum, unruly disorder bordering on chaos but also a certain intriguing strange-ness' - as the defining characteristic of a fallen or historical world.<b>-----Ned Denny, <i>Times Literary Supplement</i></b><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><br><strong>Ross Chambers </strong>is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books including <em>Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting</em>, <em>Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author</em>, <em>Loiterature</em>, and <em>The Writing</em><br><em>of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism</em>.<br>
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