The Ruins Lesson
Meaning and Material in Western Culture
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Valuing Ruin
I. Matter: This Ruined Earth
II. Marks: Inscriptions and Spolia
III. Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and Whores—On the Ruin of Women
IV. Matrix: Humanism and the Rise of the Ruins Print
V. Model: The Architectural Imaginary
VI. Mirrors: The Voyages and Fantasies of the Ruins Craze
VII. The Unfinished: On the Nonfinality of Certain Works of Art
VIII. Resisting Ruin: The Decay of Monuments and the Promises of Language
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Photography Credits
Name Index
Subject Index
Preface
Introduction: Valuing Ruin
I. Matter: This Ruined Earth
II. Marks: Inscriptions and Spolia
III. Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and Whores—On the Ruin of Women
IV. Matrix: Humanism and the Rise of the Ruins Print
V. Model: The Architectural Imaginary
VI. Mirrors: The Voyages and Fantasies of the Ruins Craze
VII. The Unfinished: On the Nonfinality of Certain Works of Art
VIII. Resisting Ruin: The Decay of Monuments and the Promises of Language
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Photography Credits
Name Index
Subject Index
Review Quotes
Michael S. Roth | The Washington Post
"Stewart, a distinguished poet, a former MacArthur fellow and a Princeton professor of the humanities, charts the West’s fascination with decayed remains, from Egyptian relics to contemporary monuments of destruction and trauma. The Ruins Lesson is a sweeping cultural history that draws in Renaissance humanism, 18th-century changes in representing the past and the Romantic reconfiguration of memory. . . . Stewart writes with poetic grace and a nonspecialist’s appreciation of printmaking, painting, literature and architecture. Readers outside the academy will find much to value in this lovely book.”
Martin E. Jay, University of California, Berkeley
“At the crossroads of transience and endurance, form and chaos, memory and materiality, ruins have been among the most poignant markers of the vain human struggle to resist the ravages of time. Drawing on an astonishing range of examples from the histories of art and literature, Stewart brings to their interpretation her unique gifts of analytic acumen and poetic evocation. The Ruins Lesson is a master class in cultural criticism, revealing the sweet melancholy that fuels our fascination with the shards, fragments, and torsos of things past.”
Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge
“The Ruins Lesson explores ruins without end and ruins as an end in themselves in Western culture—autotelic ruins. Wordsworth’s phrase ‘decaying never to be decayed’ signals the Romantic fascination with ruination that Stewart’s erudite book traces from the classical past to its culmination in the work of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth. Through dazzlingly imaginative connections and compelling visual illustrations, Stewart argues that ruins are at once the sign of what remains forever unfinished and sites for discovery. Ruins are the vestiges and traces by which the past inspires the future; whether in printmaking, aesthetics, or poetry, they offer a critique of a materialist approach to art.”
Kenneth Gross, University of Rochester
“In this expansive, beautifully wrought history of how ruins are imagined, they become sites of wonder, play, and love, places of making as well as places of destruction. In taking up the lessons of ruins, the book explores the varied, volatile forms in which we imagine and remember and care for, or fail to care for, the made and given world. That care shows itself in Stewart’s own quality of attention, the range of her curiosity, the depth of her scholarship, the risk of her thought. This is cultural history as poetic phenomenology.”
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Architecture: History of Architecture
History: European History
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Philosophy: Aesthetics
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