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.

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

How do urban ruins provoke their cultural revaluation? This book offers a unique sociological analysis about the social agencies of material culture and atmospheric knowledge of buildings in the making. It draws on ethnographic research in Berlin along the former Palace of the Republic, the E-Werk and the Café Moskau in order to make visible an interdisciplinary regime of design experts who have developed a professional sensorium turning the built memory of the city into an object of aesthetic inquiry.

"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"--

Introducing Human Geographies is the leading guide to human geography for undergraduate students, explaining new thinking on essential topics and discussing exciting developments in the field. This new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated and coverage is extended with new sections devoted to biogeographies, cartographies, mobilities, non-representational geographies, population geographies, public geographies and securities. Presented in three parts with 60 contributions written by expert international researchers, this text addresses the central ideas through which human geographers understand and shape their subject. Part I: Foundations engages students with key ideas that define human geography’s subject matter and approaches, through critical analyses of dualisms such as local-global, society-space and human-nonhuman. Part II: Themes explores human geography’s main sub-disciplines, with sections devoted to biogeographies, cartographies, cultural geographies, development geographies, economic geographies, environmental geographies, historical geographies, political geographies, population geographies, social geographies, urban and rural geographies. Finally, Part III: Horizons assesses the latest research in innovative areas, from mobilities and securities to non-representational geographies. This comprehensive, stimulating and cutting edge introduction to the field is richly illustrated throughout with full colour figures, maps and photos. These are available to download on the companion website, located at www.routledge.com/9781444135350.