On the 200th anniversary of Baudelaire's birth comes this stunning landmark translation of the book that launched modern poetry

"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"-- "What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates...

Although much has been written on autobiography, the same cannot be said of auto-thanatography, the writing of one's death. This study starts from the deconstructive premise that autobiography is aporetic, not or not only a matter of a subject strategizing with language to produce an exemplary identity but a matter also of its responding to an exorbitant call to write its death. The I-dominated representations of particular others and of the privileged...