Untimely Ruins

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Untimely Ruins

Author : Nick Yablon
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226946657
Total Pages : 397 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (269 download)

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Book Synopsis Untimely Ruins by : Nick Yablon

Download or read book Untimely Ruins written by Nick Yablon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Megan Kate Nelson
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 082034379X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Ruin Nation by : Megan Kate Nelson

Download or read book Ruin Nation written by Megan Kate Nelson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Paul Graves-Brown
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191663948
Total Pages : 864 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World by : Paul Graves-Brown

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World written by Paul Graves-Brown and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Time and Literature

Author : Thomas M. Allen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108397255
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis Time and Literature by : Thomas M. Allen

Download or read book Time and Literature written by Thomas M. Allen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and Literature features twenty essays on topics from aesthetics and narratology to globalisation and queer temporalities, and showcases how time studies, often referred to as 'the temporal turn', cut across and illuminate research in every field of literature, as well as interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon history, philosophy, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Part one, Origins, addresses fundamental issues that can be traced back to the beginnings of literary criticism. Part two, Developments, shows how thinking about Time has been crucial to various interpretive revolutions that have impacted literary theory. Part three, Application, illustrates the centrality of temporal theorising to literary criticism in a variety of contemporary approaches, from ecocriticism and new materialisms to media and archive studies. The first anthology to provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on the temporality of literary language from across different national and historical periods, Time and Literature will appeal to academic researchers and interested laypersons alike.

Empire of Ruins

Author : Miles Orvell
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190491604
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire of Ruins by : Miles Orvell

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.

Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

Author : Efterpi Mitsi
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030269051
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination by : Efterpi Mitsi

Download or read book Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination written by Efterpi Mitsi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Nick Yablon
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022657427X
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Remembrance of Things Present by : Nick Yablon

Download or read book Remembrance of Things Present written by Nick Yablon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Bjørnar Olsen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317695801
Total Pages : 511 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Ruin Memories by : Bjørnar Olsen

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.

Imagined Frontiers

Author : Carl Abbott
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 0806152400
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (61 download)

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Book Synopsis Imagined Frontiers by : Carl Abbott

Download or read book Imagined Frontiers written by Carl Abbott and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The World Refugees Made

Author : Pamela Ballinger
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501747606
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The World Refugees Made by : Pamela Ballinger

Download or read book The World Refugees Made written by Pamela Ballinger and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The World Refugees Made, Pamela Ballinger explores Italy's remaking in light of the loss of a wide range of territorial possessions—colonies, protectorates, and provinces—in Africa and the Balkans, the repatriation of Italian nationals from those territories, and the integration of these "national refugees" into a country devastated by war and overwhelmed by foreign displaced persons from Eastern Europe. Post-World War II Italy served as an important laboratory, in which categories differentiating foreign refugees (who had crossed national boundaries) from national refugees (those who presumably did not) were debated, refined, and consolidated. Such distinctions resonated far beyond that particular historical moment, informing legal frameworks that remain in place today. Offering an alternative genealogy of the postwar international refugee regime, Ballinger focuses on the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status of those migrants who became classified as national refugees. The presence of displaced persons also posed the complex question of who belonged, culturally and legally, in an Italy that was territorially and politically reconfigured by decolonization. The process of demarcating types of refugees thus represented a critical moment for Italy, one that endorsed an ethnic conception of identity that citizenship laws made explicit. Such an understanding of identity remains salient, as Italians still invoke language and race as bases of belonging in the face of mass immigration and ongoing refugee emergencies. Ballinger's analysis of the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization illuminates the study of human rights history, humanitarianism, postwar reconstruction, fascism and its aftermaths, and modern Italian history.

Rethinking the American City

Author : Miles Orvell
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 081224561X
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Rethinking the American City by : Miles Orvell

Download or read book Rethinking the American City written by Miles Orvell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Marking Modern Times

Author : Alexis McCrossen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022601486X
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis Marking Modern Times by : Alexis McCrossen

Download or read book Marking Modern Times written by Alexis McCrossen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Peter Bjerregaard
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317099427
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Materialities of Passing by : Peter Bjerregaard

Download or read book Materialities of Passing written by Peter Bjerregaard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘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

Author : Robert Yeates
Publisher : UCL Press
ISBN 13 : 1800080980
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by : Robert Yeates

Download or read book American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction written by Robert Yeates and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : D. Williams
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137330082
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (373 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing Postcommunism by : D. Williams

Download or read book Writing Postcommunism written by D. Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-16 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : J. Michelle Coghlan
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474411215
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis Sensational Internationalism by : J. Michelle Coghlan

Download or read book Sensational Internationalism written by J. Michelle Coghlan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Landscape as Weapon

Author : John Beck
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1789143063
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (891 download)

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Book Synopsis Landscape as Weapon by : John Beck

Download or read book Landscape as Weapon written by John Beck and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the playgrounds and raw material for the avantgarde, abandoned places and things—decommissioned military sites, postindustrial spaces, contested and forgotten edgelands—are now just as likely to be seen as assets for entrepreneurs or connoisseurs of the authentically worn-out. This is the age of patina, where the material remains of times past—the fields and factories, test sites, back alleys, machines, and statues—are coveted, adored, mourned, and commemorated, as well as sometimes despised. Through an exploration of a wide range of recent film, photography, art, and writing about place, Landscape as Weapon argues that these abandoned sites are a critical arena for debate about the meaning of space and time under late capitalism.