Challenging Urban Anesthetics: Beauty and Contradiction in Georg Simmel's Rome. With seven images and notes “in the meantime”

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelfagfællebedømt

Georg Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” is barely capable of informing aesthetic categories, such as Beauty. After all, Simmel’s concept of the blasé attitude is so pervasive that it seems to exclude sensory experience from modern city life. Documents from Simmel’s stay in Rome in 1898, however, reveal his aesthetic sensitivity as a traveler; he is attentive to the city as a constellation of differences that inspire beauty, and his encounter with modern Rome is a source of sensory contradictions. Topographically, Simmel’s Roman essays provide one example: a silent garden overlooking noisy Rome. By revisiting this place in 2018, we trace Simmel’s viewpoints and arguments and develop a somaesthetic experience of beauty and urbanity during a springtime afternoon at this site.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftJournal of Somaesthetics
Vol/bind6, 1
Sider (fra-til)65-90
Antal sider26
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2020

Bibliografisk note

With six digital photographs in color, taken by the author in Rome 2018, and commented on in the article.

    Forskningsområder

  • Det Humanistiske Fakultet - Georg Simmel, Beauty, Schönheit, Rome, Giardino di Sant'Alessio, Urban park, Photography, Memory, Urbs, Urbanity, Happiness, Children, Play, Lemon trees, Orange trees

ID: 243828411