Description
Book SynopsisA Rhetoric of Ruins contributes to an interdisciplinary conversation about the role of wrecked and abandoned places in modern life. Topics in this book stretch from retro- and post-human futures to a Jeremiadic analysis of the role of ruins in American presidential discourse. From that foundation, A Rhetoric of Ruins employs hauntology to visit a California ghost-town, psychogeography to confront Detroit ruins, heterochrony to survey Pennsylvania’s once (and future) Graffiti Highway, an expanded articulation of heterotopia to explore the pleasurable contamination of Chernobyl, and an evening in Turkmenistan’s Doorway to Hell that stretches across time from Homer’s Iliad to Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Written to engage scholars and students of communication studies, cultural geography, anthropology, landscape studies, performance studies, public memory, urban studies, and tourism studies, A Rhetoric of Ruins is a conceptually rich and vividly written account of how broken and derelict places help us manage our fears in the modern era.
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Yesterday’s Tomorrows
Chapter Two: Post-human Futures
Chapter Three: American Carnage
Chapter Four: Bodie’s Ghostly Gaze
Chapter Five: Detroit’s Guilty Pleasures
Chapter Six: Centralia’s Graffiti Highway
Chapter Seven: Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Chapter Eight: The Doorway to Hell
