Synopses & Reviews
What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from a contemplator of natural beauty and the sublimity of which it provides a glimpse to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city? This book traces Baudelaire's evolution from one who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary, to one who, perceiving 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, works to conceive a poetry of allegory (and an ironic prose poetry) that might have the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader. In the process a form of "modern beauty" is invented that anticipates the testimonial function of more recent artistic practice.
Review
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. --Claire Lyu, University of Virginia
"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."--Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, Vassar College
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
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, Testimonial, 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 of Contents
Foreword
I Fetish and the Everyday
1. From the Sublime to the Subliminal: Fetish Aesthetics
2. The Magic Window-Pane
II Allegory, History and the Weather of Time
3. Fetishism Becomes Allegory
4. Daylight Specters: Allegory and the Weather of Time
III Ironic Atmospherics and the Urban Diary
5. Ironic Encounters: the Poetics of Anonymity
6. "La forme d'une ville": the Urban Diary
Appendix