Ruins of Modernity

Ruins of Modernity

  • Autor: Hell, Julia; Schönle, Andreas; Adams, Julia; Steinmetz, George
  • Editor: Duke University Press
  • Colección: Politics, History, and Culture
  • ISBN: 9780822344568
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822390749
  • Lugar de publicación:  Durham , Estados Unidos
  • Año de publicación digital: 2010
  • Mes: Marzo
  • Páginas: 528
  • DDC: 909.83
  • Idioma: Ingles
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

  • CONTENTS
  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • PART I - CATASTROPHE, UTOPIA, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF DESTRUCTION
    • 1. Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity
    • 2. Air War and Architecture
    • 3. Modernism and Destruction in Architecture
    • 4. Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin’s Tower to Paper Architecture
  • PART II - RUINS AND THE DEMOCRATIC POLITY
    • 5. Modernity as a ‘‘Destroyed Anthill’’:Tolstoy on History and the Aesthetics of Ruins
    • 6. Democratic Destruction: Ruins and Emancipation in the American Tradition
    • 7. The Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism after Munich, 1938–1939
    • 8. Layered Time: Ruins as Shattered Past, Ruins as Hope in Israeli and German Landscapes and Literature
    • 9. Cities, Citizenship, and other Joburg Stories
  • PART III - EMPIRES, RUINS, AND THEIR STORIES
    • 10. Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep?
    • 11. Hegel’s Philosophy of World History via Sebald’s Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the ‘‘New Space’’ of Modernity
    • 12. Vilcashuamán: Telling Stories in Ruins
    • 13. The Monument in Ruins
    • 14. Simultaneous Modernity: Negotiations and Resistances in Urban India
  • PART IV - (POST)RUINSCAPES
    • 15. Ruins as Models: Displaying Destruction in Postwar Germany
    • 16. ‘‘Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures’’: Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany
    • 17. Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia: The Ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit
    • 18. Dr. Strangelove’s Cabinet of Wonder: Sifting through the Atomic Ruins at the Nevada Test Site
    • 19. Invisible at a Glance: Indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility
  • PART V - RUIN GAZING
    • 20. Foundational Ruins: The Lisbon Earthquake and the Sublime
    • 21. The Promise of a Ruin: Gavrila Derzhavin’s Archaic Modernity
    • 22. Ruin Cinema
    • 23. The Place of Rubble in the Trummerfilm
    • 24. Lost in Time: Boris Mikhailov and His Study of the Soviet
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

Materias

    SUSCRÍBASE A NUESTRO BOLETÍN

    Al suscribirse, acepta nuestra Politica de Privacidad