Limit search to available items
Book Cover
Book
Author Sennett, Richard, 1943-

Title Flesh and stone : the body and the city in Western civilization / Richard Sennett
Edition First edition
Published New York : W.W. Norton, [1994]
New York : W.W. Norton, c1994
c1994
©1994

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  307.7609 Sen/Fas  AVAILABLE
Description 431 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Contents Contents: Introduction: Body and City. 1. The Passive Body. 2. The Plan of the Book. 3. A Personal Note -- Ch. 1. Nakedness: The Citizen's Body in Perikles' Athens. 1. The Citizen's Body. 2. The Citizen's Voice -- Ch. 2. The Cloak of Darkness: The Protections of Ritual in Athens. 1. The Powers of Cold Bodies. 2. The Suffering Body -- Ch. 3. The Obsessive Image: Place and Time in Hadrian's Rome. 1. Look and Believe. 2. Look and Obey. 3. The Impossible Obsession -- Ch. 4. Time in the Body: Early Christians in Rome. 1. The Alien Body of Christ. 2. Christian Places. 3. Nietzsche's Hawks and Lambs -- Ch. 5. Community: The Paris of Jehan de Chelles. 1. "Stadt Luft macht frei" 2. The Compassionate Body. 3. The Christian Community -- Ch. 6. "Each Man Is a Devil to Himself": The Paris of Humbert de Romans. 1. Economic Space. 2. Economic Time. 3. The Death of Icarus -- Ch. 7. Fear of Touching: The Jewish Ghetto in Renaissance Venice. 1. Venice as a Magnet. 2. The Walls of the Ghetto
3. A Shield But Not a Sword. 4. The Miraculous Lightness of Freedom -- Ch. 8. Moving Bodies: Harvey's Revolution. 1. Circulation and Respiration. 2. The Mobile Individual. 3. The Crowd Moves -- Ch. 9. The Body Set Free: Boullee's Paris. 1. Freedom in Body and Space. 2. Dead Space. 3. Festival Bodies -- Ch. 10. Urban Individualism: E. M. Forster's London. 1. The New Rome. 2. Modern Arteries and Veins. 3. Comfort. 4. The Virtue of Displacement -- Civic Bodies: Multi-Cultural New York. 1. Difference and Indifference. 2. Civic Bodies
Summary Flesh and Stone is a new history of the city in Western civilization, one that tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. It is a story of the deepest parts of life - how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed their noses, where they are, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love - all in the spaces of the city from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring the Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. This mechanical view of the flesh was expressed in the strict geometry of urban design and in the hard lines of Rome's imperial power. It also provided Christianity with a monolith to confront, setting up a great struggle in history - the things of Caesar versus the things of God. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city. Christ's physical suffering on the Cross offered medieval Parisians a way to think about places of charity and sanctuary in the city; these spaces nestled uneasily among streets given over to the release of physical aggression in a new market economy. By the Renaissance, Christian ideals of community were challenged as non-Christians and non-Europeans were drawn into the European orbit; these threatening differences were brutally articulated in the creation of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice and the fear of touching that the Ghetto exemplified. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from ancient pagan and Christian beliefs. Harvey's science, revealing the body as a circulating system, paralleled eighteenth-century attempts to circulate bodies freely in the city. In revolutionary Paris, the demand for freedom of individual movement came into conflict with the need for communal space. Since that time, the freely moving individual body has come to be sharply at odds with the physical awareness - frequently unwanted - of other human beings, a friction evident in edgy, modern London and New York
Analysis Body, Human - Social aspects
Cities and towns - History
Civilization, Western
Notes Errata slip inserted
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [377]-413) and index
Subject Cities and towns -- History.
Civilization, Western.
Human body -- Social apects
Human body -- Social aspects.
LC no. 94015874
ISBN 0393036847