Untimely Ruins

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Untimely Ruins

Nick Yablon
Untimely Ruins Book PDF

Author : Nick Yablon
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2010-06-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226946658

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Untimely Ruins by Nick Yablon Pdf

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.

Ruin Nation

Megan Kate Nelson
Ruin Nation Book PDF

Author : Megan Kate Nelson
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2012-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820343792

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Ruin Nation by Megan Kate Nelson Pdf

During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers’ bodies were transformed into “dead heaps of ruins,” novel sights in the southern landscape. How did this happen, and why? And what did Americans—northern and southern, black and white, male and female—make of this proliferation of ruins? Ruin Nation is the first book to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change. Megan Kate Nelson examines the narratives and images that Americans produced as they confronted the war’s destructiveness. Architectural ruins—cities and houses—dominated the stories that soldiers and civilians told about the “savage” behavior of men and the invasions of domestic privacy. The ruins of living things—trees and bodies—also provoked discussion and debate. People who witnessed forests and men being blown apart were plagued by anxieties about the impact of wartime technologies on nature and on individual identities. The obliteration of cities, houses, trees, and men was a shared experience. Nelson shows that this is one of the ironies of the war’s ruination—in a time of the most extreme national divisiveness people found common ground as they considered the war’s costs. And yet, very few of these ruins still exist, suggesting that the destructive practices that dominated the experiences of Americans during the Civil War have been erased from our national consciousness.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World

Paul Graves-Brown,Rodney Harrison,Angela Piccini
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World Book PDF

Author : Paul Graves-Brown,Rodney Harrison,Angela Piccini
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 864 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2013-10-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780191663949

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The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World by Paul Graves-Brown,Rodney Harrison,Angela Piccini Pdf

It has been clear for many years that the ways in which archaeology is practised have been a direct product of a particular set of social, cultural, and historical circumstances - archaeology is always carried out in the present. More recently, however, many have begun to consider how archaeological techniques might be used to reflect more directly on the contemporary world itself: how we might undertake archaeologies of, as well as in the present. This Handbook is the first comprehensive survey of an exciting and rapidly expanding sub-field and provides an authoritative overview of the newly emerging focus on the archaeology of the present and recent past. In addition to detailed archaeological case studies, it includes essays by scholars working on the relationships of different disciplines to the archaeology of the contemporary world, including anthropology, psychology, philosophy, historical geography, science and technology studies, communications and media, ethnoarchaeology, forensic archaeology, sociology, film, performance, and contemporary art. This volume seeks to explore the boundaries of an emerging sub-discipline, to develop a tool-kit of concepts and methods which are applicable to this new field, and to suggest important future trajectories for research. It makes a significant intervention by drawing together scholars working on a broad range of themes, approaches, methods, and case studies from diverse contexts in different parts of the world, which have not previously been considered collectively.

Empire of Ruins

Miles Orvell
Empire of Ruins Book PDF

Author : Miles Orvell
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780190491604

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Empire of Ruins by Miles Orvell Pdf

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.

Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

Efterpi Mitsi,Anna Despotopoulou,Stamatina Dimakopoulou,Emmanouil Aretoulakis
Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination Book PDF

Author : Efterpi Mitsi,Anna Despotopoulou,Stamatina Dimakopoulou,Emmanouil Aretoulakis
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2019-11-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030269050

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Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination by Efterpi Mitsi,Anna Despotopoulou,Stamatina Dimakopoulou,Emmanouil Aretoulakis Pdf

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

Remembrance of Things Present

Nick Yablon
Remembrance of Things Present Book PDF

Author : Nick Yablon
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 415 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2019-06-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226574271

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Remembrance of Things Present by Nick Yablon Pdf

Time capsules offer unexpected insights into how people view their own time, place, and culture, as well as their duties to future generations. Remembrance of Things Present traces the birth of this device to the Gilded Age, when growing urban volatility prompted doubts about how the period would be remembered—or if it would be remembered at all. Yablon details how diverse Americans – from presidents and mayors to advocates for the rights of women, blacks, and workers – constructed prospective memories of their present. They did so by contributing not just written testimony to time capsules but also sources that historians and archivists considered illegitimate, such as photographs, phonograph records, films, and everyday artifacts. By offering a direct line to posterity, time capsules stimulated various hopes for the future. Remembrance of Things Present delves into these treasure chests to unearth those forgotten futures.

Ruin Memories

Bjørnar Olsen,Þóra Pétursdóttir
Ruin Memories Book PDF

Author : Bjørnar Olsen,Þóra Pétursdóttir
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 511 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2014-04-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317695806

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Ruin Memories by Bjørnar Olsen,Þóra Pétursdóttir Pdf

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.

Imagined Frontiers

Carl Abbott
Imagined Frontiers Book PDF

Author : Carl Abbott
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2015-09-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780806152400

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Imagined Frontiers by Carl Abbott Pdf

We live near the edge—whether in a settlement at the core of the Rockies, a gated community tucked into the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains, a silicon culture emerging in the suburbs, or, in the future, homesteading on a terraformed Mars. In Imagined Frontiers, urban historian and popular culture scholar Carl Abbott looks at the work of American artists who have used novels, film, television, maps, and occasionally even performance art to explore these frontiers—the metropolitan frontier of suburban development, the classic continental frontier of American settlement, and the yet unrealized frontiers beyond Earth. Focusing on writers and artists working during the past half-century, an era of global economic and social reach, Abbott describes the dialogue between historians and social scientists seeking to understand these frontier places and the artists reimagining them in written and visual fictions. This book offers perspectives on such well-known authors as T. C. Boyle and John Updike and on such familiar movies and television shows as Falling Down and The Sopranos. By putting The Rockford Files and the cult favorite Firefly in conversation with popular fiction writers Robert Heinlein and Stephen King and literary novelists Peter Matthiessen and Leslie Marmon Silko, Abbott interweaves the disparate subjects of western history, urban planning, and science fiction in a single volume. Abbott combines all-new essays with others previously published but substantially revised to integrate western and urban history, literary analysis, and American studies scholarship in a uniquely compelling analysis of the frontier in popular culture.

Rethinking the American City

Miles Orvell,Klaus Benesch,Dolores Hayden
Rethinking the American City Book PDF

Author : Miles Orvell,Klaus Benesch,Dolores Hayden
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780812245615

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Rethinking the American City by Miles Orvell,Klaus Benesch,Dolores Hayden Pdf

Whether struggling in the wake of postindustrial decay or reinventing themselves with new technologies and populations, cities have once again moved to the center of intellectual and political concern. Rethinking the American City brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplines to examine an array of topics that illuminate the past, present, and future of cities. Rethinking the American City offers a lively and fascinating survey of contemporary thinking about cities in a transnational context. Utilizing an innovative format, each chapter opens with an iconic image and includes a brief and provocative essay on a single topic followed by an extended dialogue among all the essayists. Topics range from energy use, design, and digital media to transportation systems and housing to public art, urban ruins, and futurist visions. By engaging with key contemporary concerns—public and private space, sustainability, ethnic and racial divisions, and technology—this volume illuminates how global society has imagined American urban life. Contributors: Klaus Benesch, Dolores Hayden, David M. Lubin, Malcolm McCullough, Jeffrey L. Meikle, David E. Nye, Miles Orvell, Andrew Ross, Mabel O. Wilson, Albena Yaneva.

The Ruin of the Eternal City

David Karmon
The Ruin of the Eternal City Book PDF

Author : David Karmon
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2011-06-09
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780199766895

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The Ruin of the Eternal City by David Karmon Pdf

The Ruin of the Eternal City provides the first systematic analysis of the preservation practices of the popes, civic magistrates, and ordinary citizens of Renaissance Rome. This study offers a new understanding of historic preservation as it occurred during the extraordinary rebuilding of a great European capital city.

Marking Modern Times

Alexis McCrossen
Marking Modern Times Book PDF

Author : Alexis McCrossen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2013-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226014869

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Marking Modern Times by Alexis McCrossen Pdf

In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks, and expands our understanding of the ways we have standardized time and have made timekeepers serve as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that not merely values time, but regards access to it as a natural-born right.

Materialities of Passing

Peter Bjerregaard,Anders Emil Rasmussen,Tim Flohr Sørensen
Materialities of Passing Book PDF

Author : Peter Bjerregaard,Anders Emil Rasmussen,Tim Flohr Sørensen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317099420

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Materialities of Passing by Peter Bjerregaard,Anders Emil Rasmussen,Tim Flohr Sørensen Pdf

‘Passing’ is a common euphemism for the death of a person, as he or she is said to ‘pass away’ or ‘pass on’. This open-ended saying has at its heart a notion of transformation from one state to another, which in turn grants the possibility of grasping or approximating the passage of time and the materiality of death and decay. This book begins with the idea that since all material things - whether animals, human beings, objects or buildings - undergo some form of passing, then the specific transformation in these passages and the materiality actively given to it can offer us a grasp of otherwise precarious temporalities. It examines how human beings strive to relate to the temporal dimension of death and decay, by giving new shape and direction to being and by examining its natural transformations. Focusing on the materiality of passing, and thereby the relationship between embodiment, temporality and death, Materialities of Passing offers rich case studies from Europe, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and the Russian Far East for exploring the material, spatial and directional aspects of the very interface between life and death. As such, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, death studies, archaeology, philosophy and cultural studies.

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Robert Yeates
American Cities in Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction Book PDF

Author : Robert Yeates
Publisher : UCL Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2021-11-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781800080980

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American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates Pdf

Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins.

Writing Postcommunism

D. Williams
Writing Postcommunism Book PDF

Author : D. Williams
Publisher : Springer
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2013-08-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137330086

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Writing Postcommunism by D. Williams Pdf

Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight.

Sensational Internationalism

J. Michelle Coghlan
Sensational Internationalism Book PDF

Author : J. Michelle Coghlan
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09-08
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781474411219

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Sensational Internationalism by J. Michelle Coghlan Pdf

In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. It offers fascinating, remarkably accessible readings of a range of literary works, from periodical poetry and boys' adventure fiction to radical pulp and the writings of Henry James, as well as a rich analysis of visual, print, and performance culture, from post-bellum illustrated weeklies and panoramas to agit-prop pamphlets and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows. This book will speak to readers looking to understand the affective, cultural, and aesthetic afterlives of revolt and revolution pre-and-post Occupy Wall Street, as well as those interested in space, gender, performance, and transatlantic print culture.