The City of the Senses - by K Defazio (Hardcover)

About the Book

Offering an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to the city which opens up new ways of understanding urban culture and urban 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.Urban cultural theory, the book contends, needs to understand the human senses in the context of (imperceptible) material relations of production so as to take part in the struggle to transform them. "

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.