Ruins of Modernity

by Hell, Julia; Schonle, Andreas

• ISBN13: 9780822344568
• ISBN10: 0822344564
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-26
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

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 their introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schouml;nle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the pre-modern past. Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One of the other contributors examines how W. G. Sebald's novelThe Rings of Saturnbetrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed spectre 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 addressed include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuaman, Tolstoy's response inWar and Peaceto 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 Schouml;nle; Tatiana Smoliarova; George Steinmetz; Jonathan Veitch; Gustavo Verdesio; Anthony Vidler

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Catastrophe, Utopia, and the Architecture of Destruction

Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity

Air War and Architecture

Modernism and Destruction in Architecture

Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin's Tower to the Paper Architecture

Ruins and the Democratic Polity

Modernity as a "Destroyed Anthill": Tolstoy on History and the Aesthetics of Ruins

Democratic Destruction: Ruins and Emancipation in the American Tradition

The Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism after Munich, 1938-39

Layered Time: Ruins as Shattered Post, Ruins as Hope in Israeli and German Landscapes and Literatures

Cities, Citizenship and Other Jo burg Stories

Empires, Ruins, and Their Stories

Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why did Scipio Weep?

Hegel's Philosophy of World History via Sebald's Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the "New Space" of Modernity

Vilcashuamán: Telling Stories in Ruins

The Monument in Ruins

Simultaneous Modernity: Negotiations and Resistances in Urban India

(Post-)Ruinscapes

Ruins as Models: Displaying Destruction

"Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures": Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany

Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia: The Ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit

Dr. Strangelove's Cabinet of Wonder: Sifting through the Atomic Ruins at the Nevada Test Site

Invisible at a Glance: Indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility

Ruin Gazing

Foundational Ruins: The Lisbon Earthquake and the Sublime

The Promise of a Ruin: Gavrila Derzhavin's Archaic Modernity

Ruin Cinema

The Place of Rubble in the Trummerfilm

Lost in Time: Boris Mikhailov and his Study of the Soviet

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.