Review of 'An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise'. By Ross Chambers. (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics.) New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. xiii + 187 pp.

Abstract

Reading Ross Chambers's book, one has the clear feeling that it has already become a classic not only within Baudelaire studies, but, more widely, within studies devoted to modern poetry tout court. The volume develops through six chapters, divided into three parts outlining, respectively, 'discrete but also actively interactive' (p. 61) phases of Baudelaire's aesthetic evolution, in their relation to 'the question of modernity', 'understood as an experience of alienation from the (supposedly) natural' (pp. 140-41). This 'atmospherics of the city' is described as 'the subliminal awareness of a certain dimension of particularity, otherness, or strangeness’ in what is otherwise 'recognizable as ordinary, familiar, or not worthy of special attention' (pp. 1-2). The backdrop of Baudelaire's writing is the deafening environment of modern Paris - the Haussmannian city under construction (and under destruction), with its crowded streets and its social unrest. How to respond, or react, to such a context?