Description
Book SynopsisImages of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. This book traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a contextualized perspective.
Trade Review“Ever since Shelley’s traveler returned from an ‘antique land’ with news of the shattered statue of Ozymandias, king of kings, we have pondered the sober lessons of ruins and their mockery of human pretension. In this remarkable collection assembled by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, the ruinscape is that of the modern world and the gazes fall as much on our prior attempts to make sense of it as on the ruins themselves.”—
Martin Jay, author of
Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme“The scope of this book is ambitious; the execution is masterful. It is a superb collection of reflections by major scholars on the pervasive presence of ruins in contemporary cultures. It is sure to find a wide readership among urban historians; scholars of modernity; scholars and students of German, European, and post-Soviet studies; film scholars; and art historians.”—
Ulrich Baer, author of
Spectral Evidence: The Photography of TraumaTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle
Part I. Catastrophe, Utopia, and the Architecture of Destruction
1. Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity / Andreas Huyssen
2. Air War and Architecture / Anthony Vidler
3. Modernism and Destruction in Architecture / Vladimir Paperny
4. Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin's Tower to the Paper Architecture / Svetlana Boym
Part II. Ruins and the Democratic Polity
5. Modernity as a "Destroyed Anthill": Tolstoy on History and the Aesthetics of Ruins / Andreas Schönle
6. Democratic Destruction: Ruins and Emancipation in the American Tradition / Russell A. Berman
7. The Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism after Munich, 1938–39 / Jonathan Bolton
8. Layered Time: Ruins as Shattered Post, Ruins as Hope in Israeli and German Landscapes and Literatures / Amir Eshel
9. Cities, Citizenship and Other
Jo burg Stories / Lucia Saks
Part III. Empires, Ruins, and Their Stories
10. Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why did Scipio Weep? / Julia Hell
11. Hegel's Philosophy of World History via Sebald's Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the "New Space" of Modernity / Todd Samuel Presner
12. Vilcashuamán: Telling Stories in Ruins / Jon Beasley-Murray
13. The Monument in Ruins / Daniel Herwitz
14. Simultaneous Modernity: Negotiations and Resistances in Urban India / Rahul Mehrotra
Part IV. (Post-)Ruinscapes
15. Ruins as Models: Displaying Destruction
16. "Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures": Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany / Kerstin Barndt
17. Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia: The Ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit / George Steinmetz
18. Dr. Strangelove's Cabinet of Wonder: Sifting through the Atomic Ruins at the Nevada Test Site / Jonathan Veitich
19. Invisible at a Glance: Indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility / Gustavo Verdesio
Part V. Ruin Gazing
20. Foundational Ruins: The Lisbon Earthquake and the Sublime / Alexander Regier
21. The Promise of a Ruin: Gavrila Derzhavin's Archaic Modernity / Tatiana Smoliarova
22. Ruin Cinema / Johannes von Moltke
23. The Place of Rubble in the
Trummerfilm / Eric Rentschler
24. Lost in Time: Boris Mikhailov and his Study of the Soviet / Helen Petrovksy
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
