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 Schonle 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
Vilcashuaman, 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
Schonle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch,
Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler
General
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