Download or read book A Rhetoric of Ruins written by Andrew F. Wood and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Rhetoric of Ruins contributes to an interdisciplinary conversation about the role of wrecked and abandoned places in modern life. Topics in this book stretch from retro- and post-human futures to a Jeremiadic analysis of the role of ruins in American presidential discourse. From that foundation, A Rhetoric of Ruins employs hauntology to visit a California ghost-town, psychogeography to confront Detroit ruins, heterochrony to survey Pennsylvania’s once (and future) Graffiti Highway, an expanded articulation of heterotopia to explore the pleasurable contamination of Chernobyl, and an evening in Turkmenistan’s Doorway to Hell that stretches across time from Homer’s Iliad to Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Written to engage scholars and students of communication studies, cultural geography, anthropology, landscape studies, performance studies, public memory, urban studies, and tourism studies, A Rhetoric of Ruins is a conceptually rich and vividly written account of how broken and derelict places help us manage our fears in the modern era.
Download or read book Broken Cities written by Martin Devecka and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on literature, legal texts, epigraphic evidence, and the narratives embodied in monuments and painting, Broken Cities is an expansive and nuanced study that holds great significance for the field of historiography.
Download or read book Public Forgetting written by Bradford Vivian and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forgetting is usually juxtaposed with memory as its opposite in a negative way: it is seen as the loss of the ability to remember, or, ironically, as the inevitable process of distortion or dissolution that accompanies attempts to commemorate the past. The civic emphasis on the crucial importance of preserving lessons from the past to prevent us from repeating mistakes that led to violence and injustice, invoked most poignantly in the call of “Never again” from Holocaust survivors, tends to promote a view of forgetting as verging on sin or irresponsibility. In this book, Bradford Vivian hopes to put a much more positive spin on forgetting by elucidating its constitutive role in the formation and transformation of public memory. Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how, contrary to conventional wisdom, communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of their shared past.
Download or read book Rhetorical Exposures written by Christopher Carter and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present in order to illuminate the political dimensions and consequences of photographs taken and selected to highlight social injustice.
Download or read book Post Apocalyptic Culture written by Teresa Heffernan and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2008-12-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Post-Apocalyptic Culture, Teresa Heffernan poses the question: what is at stake in a world that no longer believes in the power of the end? Although popular discourse increasingly understands apocalypse as synonymous with catastrophe, historically, in both its religious and secular usage, apocalypse was intricately linked to the emergence of a better world, to revelation, and to disclosure. In this interdisciplinary study, Heffernan uses modernist and post-modernist novels as evidence of the diminished faith in the existence of an inherently meaningful end. Probing the cultural and historical reasons for this shift in the understanding of apocalypse, she also considers the political implications of living in a world that does not rely on revelation as an organizing principle. With fascinating readings of works by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, E.M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, D.H. Lawrence, and Angela Carter, Post-Apocalyptic Culture is a provocative study of how twentieth-century culture and society responded to a world in which a belief in the end had been exhausted.
Download or read book Ruins and Empire written by Laurence Goldstein and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2017-11-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most common scenes in Augustan and Romantic literature is that of a writer confronting some emblem of change and loss, most often the remains of a vanished civilization or a desolate natural landscape. Ruins and Empire traces the ruin sentiment from its earliest classical and Renaissance expressions through English literature to its establishment as a dominant theme of early American art.
Download or read book Postmodern Apocalypse written by Richard Dellamora and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From accounts of the Holocaust, to representations of AIDS, to predictions of environmental disaster; from Hal Lindsey's fundamentalist 1970s bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, the sense of apocalypse is very much with us. In Postmodern Apocalypse, Richard Dellamora and his contributors examine apocalypse in works by late twentieth-century writers, filmmakers, and critics.
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 Exploring Visual Literacy Inside Outside and Through the Frame written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary exploration of visual literacy is a result of the discussions that arose at the 2011 Conference on Visual Literacy in Oxford. Consistent with the themes which surfaced at the conference, this collection of articles examines our ways of framing what we see.
Download or read book Beautiful Terrible Ruins written by Dora Apel and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.
Download or read book Broken Cities written by Martin Devecka and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative study of cities that fell into ruin through human involvement. We have been taught to think of ruins as historical artifacts, relegated to the past by a catastrophic event. Instead, Martin Devecka argues that we should see them as processes taking place over a long present. In Broken Cities, Devecka offers a wide-ranging comparative study of ruination, the process by which monuments, architectural sites, and urban centers decay into ruin over time. Weaving together four case studies—of classical Athens, late antique Rome, medieval Baghdad, and sixteenth-century Mexico City—Devecka shows that ruination is a complex social process largely contingent on changing imperial control rather than the result of immediate or natural events. Drawing on literature, legal texts, epigraphic evidence, and the narratives embodied in monuments and painting, Broken Cities is an expansive and nuanced study that holds great significance for the field of historiography.
Download or read book Ruin Memories written by Bjørnar Olsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the nineteenth century, mass-production, consumerism and cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly victimized rapidly and made redundant. At the same time, processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production. The outcome is a ruin landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally omitted from academic concerns and conventional histories. The archaeology of the recent or contemporary past has grown fast during the last decade. This development has been concurrent with a broader popular, artistic and scholarly interest in modern ruins in general. Ruin Memories explores how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses, reassesses the cultural and historical value of modern ruins and suggests possible means for reaffirming their cultural and historic significance. Crucial for this reassessment is a concern with decay and ruination, and with the role things play in expressing the neglected, unsuccessful and ineffable. Abandonment and ruination is usually understood negatively through the tropes of loss and deprivation; things are degraded and humiliated while the information, knowledge and memory embedded in them become lost along the way. Without even ignoring its many negative and traumatizing aspects, a main question addressed in this book is whether ruination also can be seen as an act of disclosure. If ruination disturbs the routinized and ready-to-hand, to what extent can it also be seen as a recovery of memory as exposing meanings and presences that perhaps are only possible to grasp at second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality? Anybody interested in the archaeology of the contemporary past will find Ruin Memories an essential guide to the very latest theoretical research in this emerging field of archaeological thought.
Download or read book Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris written by Peter Brooks and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a distinguished literary historian, a look at Gustave Flaubert and his correspondence with George Sand during France's "terrible year" -- summer 1870 through spring 1871 From the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871, France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against Prussia and witnessed bloody class warfare that culminated in the crushing of the Paris Commune. In Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Peter Brooks examines why Flaubert thought his recently published novel, Sentimental Education, was prophetic of the upheavals in France during this "terrible year," and how Flaubert's life and that of his compatriots were changed forever. Brooks uses letters between Flaubert and his novelist friend and confidante George Sand to tell the story of Flaubert and his work, exploring his political commitments and his understanding of war, occupation, insurrection, and bloody political repression. Interweaving history, art history, and literary criticism-from Flaubert's magnificent novel of historical despair, to the building of the reactionary monument the Sacréoeur on Paris's highest summit, to the emergence of photography as historical witness-Brooks sheds new light on the pivotal moment when France redefined herself for the modern world.
Download or read book Narrating Objects Collecting Stories written by Sandra H. Dudley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the stories that can be told by and about objects and those who choose to collect them. Examining collecting in different historical, social and institutional contexts, the authors consider the meanings and values with which objects are imputed and the processes and implications of collecting.
Download or read book Reframing the Ruins written by Elizabeth Birmingham and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Digital Detroit written by Jeff Rice and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1967 riots that ripped apart the city, Detroit has traditionally been viewed either as a place in ruins or a metropolis on the verge of rejuvenation. In Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, author Jeff Rice goes beyond the notion of Detroit as simply a city of two ideas. Instead he explores the city as a web of multiple meanings which, in the digital age, come together in the city’s spaces to form a network that shapes the writing, the activity, and the very thinking of those around it. Rice focuses his study on four of Detroit’s most iconic places—Woodward Avenue, the Maccabees Building, Michigan Central Station, and 8 Mile—covering each in a separate chapter. Each of these chapters explains one of the four features of network rhetoric: folksono(me), the affective interface, response, and decision making. As these rhetorical features connect, they form the overall network called Digital Detroit. Rice demonstrates how new media, such as podcasts, wikis, blogs, interactive maps, and the Internet in general, knit together Detroit into a digital network whose identity is fluid and ever-changing. In telling Detroit’s spatial story, Rice deftly illustrates how this new media, as a rhetorical practice, ultimately shapes understandings of space in ways that computer applications and city planning often cannot. The result is a model for a new way of thinking and interacting with space and the imagination, and for a better understanding of the challenges network rhetorics pose for writing.
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.
