Ruins of Modernity (Politics, History, and Culture) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822344742 ISBN 13: 9780822344742

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The scope of this book is ambitious; the execution is masterful. It is a superb collection of reflections by major scholars on the pervasive presence of ruins in contemporary cultures. It is sure to find a wide readership among urban historians; scholars of modernity; scholars and students of German, European, and post-Soviet studies; film scholars; and art historians."--Ulrich Baer, author of "Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma"

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RUINS of MODERNITY

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4474-2

Contents

List of Illustrations.....................................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction JULIA HELL AND ANDREAS SCHNLE..............................................................................................................................11. Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity ANDREAS HUYSSEN................................................................................................................172. Air War and Architecture ANTHONY VIDLER...............................................................................................................................293. Modernism and Destruction in Architecture VLADIMIR PAPERNY............................................................................................................414. Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin's Tower to Paper Architecture SVETLANA BOYM.....................................................................................585. Modernity as a "Destroyed Anthill": Tolstoy on History and the Aesthetics of Ruins ANDREAS SCHNLE....................................................................896. Democratic Destruction: Ruins and Emancipation in the American Tradition RUSSELL A. BERMAN............................................................................1047. The Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism after Munich, 1938-1939 JONATHAN BOLTON......................................................................................1188. Layered Time: Ruins as Shattered Past, Ruins as Hope in Israeli and German Landscapes and Literature AMIR ESHEL.......................................................1339. Cities, Citizenship, and other Joburg Stories LUCIA SAKS..............................................................................................................15110. Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep? JULIA HELL.............................................................................................................16911. Hegel's Philosophy of World History via Sebald's Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the "New Space" of Modernity TODD SAMUEL PRESNER.....................19312. Vilcashuam?: Telling Stories in Ruins JON BEASLEY-MURRAY.............................................................................................................21213. The Monument in Ruins DANIEL HERWITZ.................................................................................................................................23214. Simultaneous Modernity: Negotiations and Resistances in Urban India RAHUL MEHROTRA...................................................................................24415. Ruins as Models: Displaying Destruction in Postwar Germany HELMUT PUFF...............................................................................................25316. "Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures": Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany KERSTIN BARNDT..........................................27017. Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia: The Ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit GEORGE STEINMETZ....................................................................29418. Dr. Strangelove's Cabinet of Wonder: Sifting through the Atomic Ruins at the Nevada Test Site JONATHAN VEITCH........................................................32119. Invisible at a Glance: Indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility GUSTAVO VERDESIO..................................33920. Foundational Ruins: The Lisbon Earthquake and the Sublime ALEXANDER REGIER...........................................................................................35721. The Promise of a Ruin: Gavrila Derzhavin's Archaic Modernity TATIANA SMOLIAROVA......................................................................................37522. Ruin Cinema JOHANNES VON MOLTKE......................................................................................................................................39523. The Place of Rubble in the Trmmerfilm ERIC RENTSCHLER...............................................................................................................41824. Lost in Time: Boris Mikhailov and His Study of the Soviet HELEN PETROVSKY............................................................................................439Bibliography..............................................................................................................................................................459Contributors..............................................................................................................................................................489Index.....................................................................................................................................................................493

Chapter One

AUTHENTIC RUINS

Products of Modernity

At a time when the promises of the modern age lie shattered like so many ruins, when we speak with increasing frequency of the ruins of modernity, both literally and metaphorically, a key question arises for cultural historians: what has shaped our imaginary of ruins in the early twenty-first century? For example, do we think primarily of the bombed-out cities of the Second World War and of the decaying residues of the industrial age and its shrinking cities in Europe and the United States? Or does the contemporary love affair with ruins resemble the earlier fascination with the ruins of classical antiquity? Where do 9/11 and the bombing of Baghdad and Falluja figure in this discourse, if at all? And what is the relation of this imaginary of ruins to the obsessions with urban preservation, remakes, and retro fashion, all of which seem to express a fear or denial of the ruination by time? Clearly our imaginary of ruins can be read as a palimpsest of multiple historical events and representations, and the intense concern with ruins is part of the current privileging of memory and trauma both inside and outside the academy.

Given this overdetermination in the way we imagine and conceptualize ruins, I would like to ask whether there can be something like an authentic ruin of modernity. To look for an answer, I will go back to the earlier imaginary of ruins that developed in the eighteenth century's quarrel of the ancients and moderns, was carried forth in romanticism, and privileged in the nineteenth-century's celebratory and deeply ideological search for national origins, only to end up in the ruin tourism of our time. I intend this chronicle to sound like a narrative of ruinous decay, as a move from the authentic to the inauthentic. Key for my argument will be the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which I see as one of the most radical articulations of the ruin question within modernity rather than after it.

My interest in coupling the abstract concept of authenticity with the concreteness of ruins and their imaginary is based on the idea that both the ruin itself and the notion of the authentic are central topoi of modernity rather than results of what Hobsbawm has called the age of extremes. Modernity as ruin was a central topos long before the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822344742
• ISBN 13: 9780822344742
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 528
• Herausgeber: Hell
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland