Ruins and Fragments
Tales of Loss and Rediscovery
Distributed for Reaktion Books
- Contents
- Review Quotes

1. Rough Edges
2. Fragmented Wholes
3. Modernist Ruin
4. Interrupted Texts
5. Ruined Narratives
6. Art and Destruction
7. Dreams of Recovery
Epilogue: Remembering and Forgetting
Notes
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
“There is a beauty in the symmetry between Harbison’s subject matter and his style . . . those of us who love his work love precisely the way those intellectual jumbles reflect an idea about the world . . . Harbison’s books . . . consistently provide brief, fragmentary glimmers of hope.”
“Teeming study of the aesthetics and reality of ruins. . . . Harbison is well placed to explore these dilapidated cultural precincts. . . . Harbison's wide-ranging meditation on the allure of decline and decay is an erudite addition to the literature.”
“Drawing parallels from modernist literature and art, Harbison suggests that the ruin and the fragment appeal to contemporary sensibilities precisely because of their incompleteness and their embodiment of loss and nostalgia. With the destruction of sites of antiquity by Isis, this is a timely and beautifully written study of why we are so attached to pieces of the past.”
“Ruins and Fragments is a wonderfully alluring poem of absence: it weaves together such diverse strands as the language of Finnigan’s Wake, the montage of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the aggressions of analytical Cubism and the reconstruction of the Warsaw Market Square into an enticing panorama of our perplexing times.”
“A marvelous story-teller and shorer of fragments, Robert Harbison surveys the destiny of ruins from Oxyrynchus to the films of Ozu, to Phimai and beyond. Yet his underlying concern remains the aftermath of ‘war, cruelty, suffering’—the perpetual assault of human folly upon human constructions—and the history of our often poorly conceived attempts to rebuild. Harbison has composed a spell-binding meditation on the inevitability of fragmentation and dispersal.”
“Harbison proves a keen observer of the paradoxes of reconstruction.”
Architecture:
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