Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City. Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise, [New York]: Fordham University Press, 2015.
EAN13: 9780823265848
208 pages
35 $
Présentation de l'éditeur
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.
A propos de l'auteur
Ross Chambers is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books, including Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testionial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting; Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author; Loiterature; and The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism.
Table des matières
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: Allegoryand the Weather of Time
Part III: Ironic Atmospherics and the Urban Diary
5. Ironic Encounter: The Poetics of Anonymity
6. “La forme d’une ville”: The Urban Diary
Appendix
Notes
Index