Ruins of Modernity

Description

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. Contents 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 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, 1938–1939 • Jonathan Bolton 8. Layered Time: Ruins as Shattered Past, Ruins as Hope in Israeli and German Landscapes and Literature • Amir Eshel 9. Cities, Citizenship, and other Joburg 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 in Postwar Germany • Helmut Puff 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 Veitch 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 Trümmerfilm • Eric Rentschler 24. Lost in Time: Boris Mikhailov and His Study of the Soviet • Helen Petrovsky Bibliography Contributors Index