{"title":"Ross Chambers","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"room-for-maneuver-book-ross-chambers-9780226100760","title":"Room for Maneuver","description":"'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50331496546577,"sku":"GOR013930165","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50933271822609,"sku":"CIN0226100766G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51777930264849,"sku":"GOR014400486","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226100766.jpg?v=1751227619"},{"product_id":"writing-of-melancholy-book-ross-chambers-9780226100708","title":"The Writing of Melancholy","description":"Ross Chambers, an eminent critic of French literature, proposes an original theory of the development of French modernism. His work brings together practical criticism, textual theory, and historical analysis to fashion a new way of thinking about writing and reading as they intersect with history. Along the way, Chambers offers brilliant readings of texts from Madame Bovary to Les Fleurs du mal. \u003cbr\u003eAfter the failed revolution of 1848, the sense of disillusion that swept through France deeply affected the literature of the time. Chambers argues that literary melancholy and disorientation constituted a symptom of historical conditions rather than, as many other critics contend, a willful resistance to them. \u003cbr\u003eEnriched by careful readings of works by Flaubert, Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Hugo, this book is a subtle meditation on the powers of writing and reading and a suggestive contribution to current debates over the historical status of literary texts. Originally published in French, the book has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter on Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346791371025,"sku":"CIN0226100707G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226100707.jpg?v=1751070168"},{"product_id":"loiterature-book-ross-chambers-9780803263925","title":"Loiterature","description":"The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance. By offering subtle resistance to the laws of good social order, loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear-values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand. If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature's digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature. Ross Chambers is Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His books include The Writing of Melancholy and Room for Maneuver.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007513854225,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007516999953,"sku":"NIN9780803263925","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52536636342545,"sku":"GOR012633658","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0803263929.jpg?v=1761389034"},{"product_id":"story-and-situation-book-ross-chambers-9780816612987","title":"Story and Situation","description":"Ross Chambers shifs the emphasis to precisely the play of authority and mastery by focusing on the narrative situation or the “point” of telling a story in given context. He studies the relation between teller and listener in a set of French, English, and American short stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and detects in that relationship the key to the power of fiction. In each of these stories, the author identifies the narrative situation by recourse to the metaphor of seduction, a phenomenon Chambers finds characteristic of literary production in the modern period.      “Story and Situation is a powerful work of criticism, the best work in short narrative I know, and will redirect critics’ attention to a form which has always engaged readers but has recently been neglected by literary theorists. . . . It is clear, assured, and intelligently paced.”-Jonathan Culler, Cornell University","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51891019153681,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51891019383057,"sku":"GOR014449303","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780816612987.jpg?v=1764845128"},{"product_id":"atmospherics-of-the-city-book-ross-chambers-9780823265848","title":"An Atmospherics of the City","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52101846171921,"sku":"NGR9780823265848","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53588776452369,"sku":"NIN9780823265848","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823265848.jpg?v=1766657271"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-ross-chambers.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}