Download or read book An Absence of Ruins written by Orlando Patterson and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published in 1967, An Absence of Ruins is a poignant portrayal of a man shaped by the colonial education of the Caribbean intellectual class. Orlando Patterson offers a devastating critique of middle-class intellectualism through the self-condemning perceptions of the main character, Alexander Blackman, and the vibrant reality of the world he is unable to embrace - the world of the Jamaican working class. An intensive and inward portrayal of what the world looks like to a man who has been shaped by the deeply entrenched consequences of colonialism, this novel is full of sardonic humor and a nihilism that emerges as a kind of integrity."--Goodreads

Download or read book A Story of Ruins written by Wu Hung and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. The story of ruins in China is different from but connected to “ruin culture” in the West. This book explores indigenous Chinese concepts of ruins and their visual manifestations, as well as the complex historical interactions between China and the West since the eighteenth century. Wu Hung leads us through an array of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema. A Story of Ruins shows how ruins are integral to traditional Chinese culture in both architecture and pictorial forms. It traces the changes in their representation over time, from indigenous methods of recording damage and decay in ancient China, to realistic images of architectural ruins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the strong interest in urban ruins in contemporary China, as shown in the many artworks that depict demolished houses and decaying industrial sites. The result is an original interpretation of the development of Chinese art, as well as a unique contribution to global art history.

Download or read book A Shout in the Ruins written by Kevin Powers and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, this novel by the award-winning author of The Yellow Birds explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in American society. Spanning over one hundred years, from the antebellum era to the 1980's, A Shout in the Ruins examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see. Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of interstate highway through Richmond, he travels south in an attempt to recover his true origins. With the help of a young woman named Lottie, he goes in search of the place he once called home, all the while reckoning with the more than 90 years he lived as witness to so much that changed during the 20th century, and so much that didn't. As we then watch Lottie grapple with life's disappointments and joys in the 1980's, now in her own middle-age, the questions remain: How do we live in a world built on the suffering of others? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy? Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made The Yellow Birds one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A Shout in the Ruins cements Powers' place in the forefront of American letters and demands that we reckon with the moral weight of our troubling history.

Download or read book The Ruins Lesson written by Susan Stewart and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, myths and rituals of fertility, images of decay in early modern allegory and melancholy, the ruins craze of the eighteenth century, and the creation of “new ruins” for gardens and other structures. Stewart focuses particularly on Renaissance humanism and Romanticism, periods of intense interest in ruins that also offer new frames for their perception. The Ruins Lesson looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing art. Ruins, Stewart concludes, arise at the boundaries of cultures and civilizations. Their very appearance depends upon an act of translation between the past and the present, between those who have vanished and those who emerge. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

Download or read book Ruins of Absence Presence of Caribs written by Maximilian Christian Forte and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of a contemporary indigenous culture documents the vitality of a number of self-constructed "indigenous" Carib communities in the postcolonial Caribbean. These small groups, which have asserted their presence through folklore, tradition, and ceremony, have received recognition and support from the state, attention from national media, and a privileged place in historical discussions of the figure of the "Carib." The Caribbean is typically thought of as having no precolonial survivors. Maximilian Forte demonstrates that this is not the case. He convincingly argues that an indigenous presence has persisted in Trinidad and Tobago--as an actual demographic presence and a symbolic force--since the colonial period. Focusing on the Santa Rosa Carib Community in Arima, Trinidad, he explores how "Carib" has come into being as a meaningful category in Trinidad, how it has been challenged and reengineered, and how it affects the relationship between colonial political economy and modern identity formation. He also explores two previous resurgences of Amerindian community and identity in Trinidad, in the 1820s and again in the 1870s to the 1920s. Balanced between history and contemporary ethnography, this book ranges from the analysis of the forces of globalization to the performance of local rituals. By tracing notions and labels--Carib, Arawak, Indian--through time, Forte shows how indigeneity is deeply enmeshed in historical processes and has deliberately been constructed from the time of the first encounters between Europeans and Trinidad's native peoples up to the present. He maintains that the social position of "Indian" is created by various agents, including culture brokers or intermediaries, as well as by institutions such as the church and by organs of the state. Using the individual biographies of activists in Arima, where he conducted fieldwork for nearly four years, Forte also shows how intracultural diversity looks at the ground level. In addition, his historical analysis offers a fascinating commentary on attitudes toward African, European, Asian, and Venezuelan peoples and heritages and on the flow of images and information between the Americas and the Caribbean.

Download or read book Ruins of Modernity written by Julia Hell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-19 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Ruins written by Robert Ginsberg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constructs a theory of ruins that celebrates their vitality and unity in aesthetic experience. Its argument draws upon over 100 illustrations prepared in 40 countries. Ruins flourish as matter, form, function, incongruity, site, and symbol. Ruin underlies cultural values in cinema, literature and philosophy. Finally, ruin guides meditations upon our mortality and endangered world.

Download or read book The Conquest of Ruins written by Julia Hell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Ruins written by Scott Smith and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-07-18 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Trapped in the Mexican jungle, a group of friends stumble upon a creeping horror unlike anything they could ever imagine in "the best horror novel of the new century" (Stephen King). Also a major motion picture! Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation—sun-drenched days, drunken nights, making friends with fellow tourists. When the brother of one of those friends disappears, they decide to venture into the jungle to look for him. What started out as a fun day-trip slowly spirals into a nightmare when they find an ancient ruins site ... and the terrifying presence that lurks there. "The Ruins does for Mexican vacations what Jaws did for New England beaches.” —Entertainment Weekly “Smith’s nail-biting tension is a pleasure all its own.... This stuff isn’t for the faint of heart.” —New York Post “A story so scary you may never want to go on vacation, or dig around in your garden, again.” —USA Today

Download or read book Ruins written by Odai Johnson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces the remains, the remembering, and the forgetting of performance traditions of classical theater. The book argues that it is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a thousand-year sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges. In the absence of more evidence, Odai Johnson turns instead to the absence itself, pressing its most legible gaps into a narrative about scars, vanishings, erasures, and silence: all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity. In ten wide-ranging case studies, theater history and performance theory are brought together to examine the texts, artifacts, and icons left behind, reading them in fresh ways to offer an elegantly written, extended meditation on “how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic.”

Download or read book Ruins and Fragments written by Robert Harbison and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it about ruins that are so alluring, so puzzling, that they can hold some of us in endless wonder over the half-erased story they tell? In this elegant book, Robert Harbison explores the captivating hold these remains and broken pieces—from architecture, art, and literature—have on us. Why are we, he asks, so suspicious of things that are too smooth, too continuous? What makes us feel, when we look upon a fragment, that its very incompletion has a kind of meaning in itself? Is it that our experience on earth is inherently discontinuous, or that we are simply unable to believe in anything whole? Harbison guides us through ruins and fragments, both ancient and modern, visual and textual, showing us how they are crucial to understanding our current mindset and how we arrived here. First looking at ancient fragments, he examines the ways we have recovered, restored, and exhibited them as artworks. Then he moves on to modernist architecture and the ways that it seeks a fragmentary form, examining modern projects that have been designed into existing ruins, such as the Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy and the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. From there he explores literature and the works of T. S. Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Joyce, and Sterne, and how they have used fragments as the foundation for creating new work. Likewise he examines the visual arts, from Schwitters’ collages to Ruskin’s drawings, as well as cinematic works from Sergei Eisenstein to Julien Temple, never shying from more deliberate creators of ruin, from Gordon Matta-Clark to countless graffiti artists. From ancient to modern times and across every imaginable form of art, Harbison takes a poetic look at how ruins have offered us a way of understanding history and how they have enabled us to create the new.

Download or read book A Cry of Absence written by Madison Jones and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hester Cameron Glenn, a proud, well-bred southern aristocrat, is the self-appointed guardian of her family's and her community's heritage. When a young black man is chained to a tree and stoned to death, Hester deplores the brutality of the act. Slowly she comes to suspect, and finally to know, who his real murderer is, and she decides what whe must do to protect the family honor.

Download or read book The Children of Sisyphus written by Orlando Patterson and published by Peepal Tree PressLtd. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bleak portrayal of life on the Dungle—the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat—this beautifully poetic, existentialist novel turns an unwavering eye to life in the Jamaican ghetto. By interweaving the stories of Dinah, a prostitute who can never quite escape the circumstances of her life, and Brother Solomon, a respected Rastafarian leader who allows his followers to think that a ship is on its way to take them home to Ethiopia, this brutally poetic story creates intense and tragic characters who struggle to come to grips with the absurdity of life. As these downtrodden protagonists shed their illusions and expectations, they realize that there is no escape from meaninglessness, and eventually gain a special kind of dignity and stoic awareness about life and the universe.

Download or read book The Language of Ruins written by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands today in Egyptian Thebes, with more than a hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions covering its lower surfaces. Partially damaged by an earthquake, and later re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to "speak" regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, tourists flocked to the colossus of Memnon to hear the miraculous sound, and left behind their marks of devotion (proskynemata): brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon's cry; longer lists by Roman administrators; and more elaborate elegiac verses by both amateur and professional poets. The inscribed names left behind reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. While recent studies of imperial literature acknowledge the colossus, few address the inscriptions themselves. This book is the first critical assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned as a powerful site of engagement with the Greek past, and appealed to a broad segment of society. The inscriptions shed light on contemporary attitudes toward sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman imagination, and the cultural legacy of Homeric epic. Memnon is a ghost from the Homeric past anchored in the Egyptian present, and visitors yearned for a "close encounter" that would connect them with that distant past. The inscriptions thus idealize Greece by echoing archaic literature in their verses at the same time as they reflect their own historical horizon. These and other subjects are expertly explored in the book, including a fascinating chapter on the colossus's post-classical life when the statue finds new worshippers among Romantic artists and poets in nineteenth-century Europe.

Download or read book Ruins written by Odai Johnson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces the remains, the remembering, and the forgetting of performance traditions of classical theater. The book argues that it is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a thousand-year sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges. In the absence of more evidence, Odai Johnson turns instead to the absence itself, pressing its most legible gaps into a narrative about scars, vanishings, erasures, and silence: all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity. In ten wide-ranging case studies, theater history and performance theory are brought together to examine the texts, artifacts, and icons left behind, reading them in fresh ways to offer an elegantly written, extended meditation on “how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic.”

Download or read book Retail Ruins written by Jacob C. Miller and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2023-03 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of widespread precarity and ongoing crises, it is no surprise ruins have captured much attention in recent years. This book is about a new kind of space, one that is deeply troubling for consumer society: the retail ruin. Jacob C. Miller bridges human geography, archaeology and critical urban studies to offer a starting point for conceptualizing retail ruins. Drawing on fieldnotes and photographs, Miller crafts a hauntological approach informed by the theories of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to more recent thinking on assemblage, spectacle and the politics of urban space.

Download or read book A God in Ruins written by Kate Atkinson and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stunning companion to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life, "one of the best novels I've read this century" (Gillian Flynn), follows Ursula's brother Teddy as he navigates an unknown future after a perilous war. "He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future." Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances and the power of choices, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century over and over again. A God in Ruins tells the dramatic story of the 20th Century through Ursula's beloved younger brother Teddy -- would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather -- as he navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world. After all that Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have. An ingenious and moving exploration of one ordinary man's path through extraordinary times, A God in Ruins proves once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest novelists of our age.