The City of the Senses

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Kimberly DeFazio

   Pages 1-16

3. The (Dis)Continuous City

   • Kimberly DeFazio

   Pages 17-52

4. The Urban (Un)Seen

   • Kimberly DeFazio

   Pages 53-84

5. Materialism, the Sensuous City, and the Materialist Analytics of Perception

   • Kimberly DeFazio

   Pages 85-119

6. Aesthetics and the Global Polis

   • Kimberly DeFazio

   Pages 121-155

7. Designing the Senses

   • Kimberly DeFazio

   Pages 157-165

8. Back Matter

   Pages 167-190

   PDF

Offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach which opens up new ways of understanding urban culture and space. The author approaches the city as essentially a 'material' place where people live, work, and participate in social practices within historical limits set not by sensory experience or cultural meanings but material social conditions.

• aesthetics
• culture
• perception
• work

"The City of Senses is a timely contribution to understanding the 'geography of labor' and its relation to the injustices facing working people across the globe. DeFazio opens up our senses - to become more acutely aware - of how capitalist relations of production eclipse human needs in the overwhelming panorama of consumption and greed we know as neoliberal capitalism. A precise and thorough undertaking that offers a materialist reading of social practices often relegated to the cultural realm, this is critical theory at its best." - Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Assistant Professor, Educational Studies and Cultural Foundations, Purdue University

"The City of the Senses is genuinely path-breaking. Its argument is not just a timely intervention in ongoing debates about the city but a comprehensive challenge to contemporary urban theory. DeFazio's analysis and argument are magisterially informed, offering transformative interpretations of texts and films from Wordsworth's poetry to Dickens' Hard Times; from Kant and Lyotard to Ikea furniture and Lost in Translation. A lasting contribution to our understanding of the relationship of culture to society." - Julian Markels, Ohio State University, author of The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature

Kimberly DeFazio teaches in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her writings have appeared in such journals as Nature, Society and Thought, and Textual Practice and in the edited collection Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation.

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