Ruins of Modernity -

Ruins of Modernity

Julia Hell, Andreas Schönle (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover
528 Seiten
2010
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8223-4456-8 (ISBN)
128,40 inkl. MwSt
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 collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins.
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 Schönle 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 Vilcashuamán, 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 Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler

Julia Hell is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Post-Fascist Fantasies: History, Psychoanalysis, and East German Literature, also published by Duke University Press. Andreas Schönle is Professor of Russian Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Ruler in the Garden: Politics and Landscape Design in Imperial Russia and Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790–1840.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction / Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle

Part I. Catastrophe, Utopia, and the Architecture of Destruction

1. Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity / Andreas Huyssen

2. Air War and Architecture / Anthony Vidler

3. Modernism and Destruction in Architecture / Vladimir Paperny

4. Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin's Tower to the Paper Architecture / Svetlana Boym

Part II. Ruins and the Democratic Polity

5. Modernity as a "Destroyed Anthill": Tolstoy on History and the Aesthetics of Ruins / Andreas Schönle

6. Democratic Destruction: Ruins and Emancipation in the American Tradition / Russell A. Berman

7. The Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism after Munich, 1938–39 / Jonathan Bolton

8. Layered Time: Ruins as Shattered Post, Ruins as Hope in Israeli and German Landscapes and Literatures / Amir Eshel

9. Cities, Citizenship and Other Jo burg Stories / Lucia Saks

Part III. Empires, Ruins, and Their Stories

10. Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why did Scipio Weep? / Julia Hell

11. Hegel's Philosophy of World History via Sebald's Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the "New Space" of Modernity / Todd Samuel Presner

12. Vilcashuamán: Telling Stories in Ruins / Jon Beasley-Murray

13. The Monument in Ruins / Daniel Herwitz

14. Simultaneous Modernity: Negotiations and Resistances in Urban India / Rahul Mehrotra

Part IV. (Post-)Ruinscapes

15. Ruins as Models: Displaying Destruction

16. "Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures": Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany / Kerstin Barndt

17. Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia: The Ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit / George Steinmetz

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

19. Invisible at a Glance: Indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility / Gustavo Verdesio

Part V. Ruin Gazing

20. Foundational Ruins: The Lisbon Earthquake and the Sublime / Alexander Regier

21. The Promise of a Ruin: Gavrila Derzhavin's Archaic Modernity / Tatiana Smoliarova

22. Ruin Cinema / Johannes von Moltke

23. The Place of Rubble in the Trummerfilm / Eric Rentschler

24. Lost in Time: Boris Mikhailov and his Study of the Soviet / Helen Petrovksy

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Reihe/Serie Politics, History, and Culture
Zusatzinfo 83 illustrations
Verlagsort North Carolina
Sprache englisch
Gewicht 885 g
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Geschichte Geschichtstheorie / Historik
ISBN-10 0-8223-4456-4 / 0822344564
ISBN-13 978-0-8223-4456-8 / 9780822344568
Zustand Neuware
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