Search results for ""Author Julia Hell""

The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn't that empire's glory but its fall--and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building--from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon's campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and '40s--and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case--particularly that of the Nazi regime--the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.

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Images 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. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past.Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities.Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler

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This special issue marks the recent English translation of the second volume of Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, also published by Duke University Press, with new, future-oriented readings of the novel. While many of the novel’s images—migrants adrift on a surveilled and fortified Mediterranean and the rise of anti-democratic, antisemitic, and racist authoritarian movements, among others—echo contemporary issues and events, the contributors present the novel as a complex text at the intersection of art, literary, and political histories with special utility for grasping the present moment. Topics include the relationship between form and formlessness in the novel, its implications for the interpretation of art, how political encounters inform the engagement of political subjects, and Weiss’s thematization of Jewish identity and left antisemitism. The issue also includes a new translation of a 1966 public exchange between Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Contributors. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Kai Evers, Julia Hell, Seth Howes, Stefan Jonsson, Kaisa Kaakinen, Richard Langston, Matthew D. Miller, Alex Potts, Caroline Rupprecht, Peter Weiss

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