Download or read book Empire of Ruins written by Miles Orvell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.
Download or read book Empire of Ruins written by Miles Orvell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.
Download or read book Society Of The Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Bread and Circuses Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.
Download or read book The Eve of Destruction written by Peter Biskind and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2025-07-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Eve of Destruction Peter Biskind reveals the ideological battles behind the violent and seemingly mindless escapism of 21st century popular culture Wondering why we're constantly inundated with zombies, vampires, witches, aliens from outer space, extras from the Book of Revelation, and a Pandora's box of other supernatural creatures? Drawing on shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, films like Avatar and World War Z, and various other dystopian, and supernatural fantasies, cultural critic Peter Biskind explains why these formerly disreputable subjects have suddenly become mainstream, minting money and creating a vast fan base. Rather than dismissing these fictions as the worst that mass culture has to offer Biskind reveals them as battlefields on which clashing ideologies struggle for advantage. Right assails left, left bashes right, and both gang up on the center. Biskind shows how the grand, bipartisan accord that defined post-war society broke down over successive decades, hammered first from the left by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and then from the right by the Reagan Revolution, 9/11, and later the Tea Party. Where once we had consensus, we now have polarization. Extremism, which used to be a vice, has become a virtue-and a hallmark of our popular culture, even as it tears our political system to shreds.
Download or read book A Spectacle of Destruction written by Joanna Paul and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Atlantic Monthly written by and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Empire of Illusion written by Chris Hedges and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prescient book that forecast the culture that gave rise to Trump -- a society beholden to empty spectacle and obsession with image at the expense of reality, reason, and truth. An instant bestseller, Empire of Illusion is a striking and unsettling exploration of illusion and fantasy in contemporary American culture. Traveling to the ringside of professional wrestling bouts at Madison Square Garden, to Las Vegas to write about the pornographic film industry, and to academic conferences held by positive psychologists who claim to be able to engineer happiness, Hedges chronicles our flight from an ever-worsening reality. The cultural embrace of illusion and celebrity culture have accompanied a growing system of casino capitalism, which creates vast wealth for elites. Corporations have ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed our manufacturing base and impoverished our working class. Hedges exposes the mechanisms that undermine our democracy and divert us from the economic, environmental, political, and moral collapse around us. A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies, Hedges argues, and we are dying now.
Download or read book Spectacles of Empire written by Christopher A. Frilingos and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2004-10-06 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author reads the Book of Revelation as a text firmly situated in the world of imperial Roman Asia Minor, where it was written. He argues that Revelation is a Christian version of that world, complete with its own gladiatorial combats and other public spectacles.
Download or read book The Spectacle of the Real written by Geoff King and published by Intellect Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broad questions that will be explored through the examination of a wide range of textual material concern the nature and different forms of both 'spectacle' and of 'the real' (along with 'reality', 'realism' and 'authenticity'); and, especially, the points of conjuncture between the two.
Download or read book Days of Destruction Days of Revolt written by Chris Hedges and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon.com and the Washington Post Three years ago, Pulitzer Prize–winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco set out to take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. They wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the searing account of their travels.
Download or read book Spectacle written by Susan Steinberg and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inventive new collection from the author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love * A San Francisco Chronicle, Complex, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year * In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning "Cowboys." And in "Underthings," when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. These wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets. In lean, acrobatic prose, Susan Steinberg subverts assumptions about narrative and challenges conventional gender roles. She delivers insight with a fierce lyric intensity in sentences shorn of excessive sentiment or unnecessary ornament. By fusing style and story, Steinberg amplifies the connections between themes and characters so that each devastating revelation echoes throughout the collection. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew. "Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace." —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Strip written by Stefan Johannes Al and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past 70 years, various actors have dramatically reconfigured the Las Vegas Strip in many forms. I claim that behind the Strip's "reinventions" lies a process of symbolic destruction. Since resorts distinguish themselves symbolically, each new round of capital accumulation relies on the destruction of symbolic capital of existing resorts. A new resort either ups the language within a paradigm, or causes a paradigm shift, which devalues the previous resorts even further. This is why, in the context of the Strip, buildings have such a short lifespan. This dissertation is chronologically structured around the four building booms of new resort construction that occurred on the Strip. Historically, there are periodic waves of new casino resort constructions with continuous upgrades and renovation projects in between. They have been successively theorized as suburbanization, corporatization, Disneyfication, and global branding. Each building boom either conforms to a single paradigm or witnesses a paradigm shift halfway: these paradigms have been theorized as Wild West, Los Angeles Cool, Pop City, Corporate Modern, Disneyland, Sim City, and Starchitecture. During the first building boom on the Las Vegas Strip, a dusty little road suburbanized into a neon vernacular landscape of low-rise, solipsistic casino resorts that had taken over downtown Las Vegas as the new suburban center of the city. The Strip managed to take over downtown because suburbanization was used an effective technology of separation and isolation of people beneficial to the gambling industry, plus the suburban form gambling took on the Strip provided better images to disseminate at a time when suburbanization was a phenomenon that occurred across the United States. During the second building boom, the Strip morphed stylistically from pop to modern, and typologically from low-rise bungalow with tall, eccentric neon signage to high-rise megaresort, fronted by a sea of whiteboard corporate logos. Underneath this change lay a transformation of the financial structure: Teamster pensions had found a commensurate architectural expression in the spectacle of pop, until corporate financing took over, and the spectacle of corporatism prevailed. Resorts appropriate a corporate model derived from Walt Disney Company during the third building boom, the "Disneyfication" of the Strip. Resorts had taken over Disney-like qualities, providing urban theme park attractions and symbolized imaginary places first and real places later. During the fourth building boom resorts appropriate a contemporary style of architecture that lays a claim on authenticity, devaluing the themed resorts. At a time when corporations appropriate elite architecture as part of their global brand identity, so adopts the Strip star architecture as the new fetish. The historicization of "spectacle" of the Las Vegas Strip fills the gap between theories of spectacle that are low on the specifics of history, and the histories of Las Vegas that are low on theory. Moreover, it situates Las Vegas in a discussion of other places, as a postmodern and neoliberal city avant la lettre, which is important, since the Las Vegas Strip is increasingly regarded as a planning model for cities around the world, for better or worse.
Download or read book Nero Or The Destruction of Rome written by Imre Kiralfy and published by . This book was released on 1890* with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dead City written by Paul Dobraszczyk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.
Download or read book A Spectacle of Corruption written by David Liss and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Weaver, the quick-witted pugilist turned private investigator, returns in David Liss’s sequel to the Edgar Award–winning novel, A Conspiracy of Paper. “[A] wonderful book . . . every bit as good as [Liss’s] remarkable debut . . . easily one of the year’s best.”—The Boston Globe Moments after his conviction for a murder he did not commit, at a trial presided over by a judge determined to find him guilty, Benjamin Weaver is accosted by a stranger who cunningly slips a lockpick and a file into his hands. In an instant he understands two things: Someone wants him to hang—and another equally mysterious agent is determined to see him free. After a daring escape from eighteenth-century London’s most notorious prison, Weaver must face another challenge: to prove himself innocent when the corrupt courts have shown they care nothing for justice. Unable to show his face in public, Weaver pursues his inquiry disguised as a wealthy merchant seeking to involve himself in the contentious world of politics. Desperately navigating a labyrinth of schemers, crime lords, assassins, and spies, Weaver learns that in an election year, little is what it seems and the truth comes at a staggeringly high cost. Praise for A Spectacle of Corruption “[A] rousing sequel of historical, intellectual suspense. ”—San Antonio Express-News “Liss is a superb writer who evokes the squalor of London with Hogarthian gusto.”—People “In Benjamin Weaver, Mr. Liss has created a multifaceted character and a wonderful narrator.”—The New York Sun
Download or read book Spectacle written by Bruce Magnusson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global media and advances in technology have profoundly affected the way people experience events. The essays in this volume explore the dimensions of contemporary spectacles from the Arab Spring to spectatorship in Hollywood. Questioning the effects that spectacles have on their observers, the authors ask: Are viewers robbed of their autonomy, transformed into depoliticized and passive consumers, or rather are they drawn in to cohesive communities? Does their participation in an event�as audiences, activists, victims, tourists, and critics�change and complicate the event itself? Spectacle looks closely at the permeable boundaries between the reality and fiction of such events, the methods of their construction, and the implications of those methods.
Download or read book Theatre Programme for Nero Or The Destruction of Rome written by Imre Kiralfy and published by . This book was released on 1890 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
