Beautiful Terrible Ruins

Beautiful Terrible Ruins PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813574099
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Beautiful Terrible Ruins

Beautiful Terrible Ruins PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813574099
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Beautiful Terrible Ruins

Beautiful Terrible Ruins PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813574080
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins PDF Author: Jess Walter
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006209808X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
“Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.” — Richard Russo The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 . . . and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later. The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, deep in daydreams, looks out over the waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. What unfolds is a dazzling roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins PDF Author: Jess Walter
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241963001
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The No. 1 New York Times Bestseller Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio. The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before. Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach. 'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times 'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor' Booklist 'Hilarious and compelling' Esquire

A Terrible Beauty

A Terrible Beauty PDF Author: Tasha Alexander
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250058279
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Organizing a holiday in Greece to distract a heartbroken Jeremy, Lady Emily is shocked when a man from her past, believed long dead, greets the party and reveals he is being stalked by a murderous antiques trader.

Calling Memory Into Place

Calling Memory Into Place PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 197880783X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel explores how memory can be mobilized for social justice and how inherited traumas can be channeled in productive ways. Examining memorials, photographs, artworks, and her own experiences as a cancer survivor and the child of holocaust survivors, she discovers strategies for "unforgetting" the past.

A Great and Terrible Beauty

A Great and Terrible Beauty PDF Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0731814908
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?

Beautiful Disaster Signed Limited Edition

Beautiful Disaster Signed Limited Edition PDF Author: Jamie McGuire
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476719071
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Abby Abernathy is re-inventing herself as the good girl as she begins her freshman year at college, which is why she must resist lean, cut, and tattooed Travis Maddox, a classic bad boy.

Exquisite Materials

Exquisite Materials PDF Author: Abigail Joseph
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 1644531704
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book's four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.

The Light in the Ruins

The Light in the Ruins PDF Author: Chris Bohjalian
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307743926
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant comes a spellbinding novel of love, despair, and revenge—set in war-ravaged Tuscany. 1943: Tucked away in the idyllic hills of Tuscany, the Rosatis, an Italian family of noble lineage, believe that the walls of their ancient villa will keep them safe from the war raging across Europe. But when two soldiers—a German and an Italian—arrive at their doorstep asking to see an ancient Etruscan burial site, the Rosatis’ bucolic tranquility is shattered. 1955: Serafina Bettini, an investigator with the Florence Police Department, has successfully hidden her tragic scars from WWII, at least until she’s assigned to a gruesome new case—a serial killer who is targeting the remaining members of the Rosati family one by one. Soon, she will find herself digging into past secrets that will reveal a breathtaking story of moral paradox, human frailty, and the mysterious ways of the heart.