Hans Arnhold Center Library

The ruins lesson meaning and material in Western culture

Stewart, Susan 1952-

The ruins lesson meaning and material in Western culture Susan Stewart - XIV, 378 Seiten, 8 ungezählte Seiten Tafeln Illustrationen

Introduction: Valuing Ruin -- Matter: This Ruined Earth -- Marks: Inscriptions and Spolia -- Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and Whores-On the Ruin of Women -- Matrix: Humanism and the Rise of the Ruins Print -- Model: The Architectural Imaginary -- Mirrors: The Voyages and Fantasies of the Ruins Craze -- The Unfinished: On the Nonfinality of Certain Works of Art -- Resisting Ruin: The Decay of Monuments and the Promises of Language

"In "The Ruins Lesson," the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster"--

9780226632612 cloth

9780226632612

2019030168


Ruins in literature
Ruins in art
Antiquities in literature
Antiquities in art

Class of Spring 2014 John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities Fellow Written at the Academy

PN56.R87

809/.9335
©American Academy in Berlin GmbH, 2023
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Background picture: by Annie Spratt  on Unsplash

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