The Ruins Lesson

The Ruins Lesson PDF Author: Susan Stewart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679220X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
"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"--

The Ruins Lesson

The Ruins Lesson PDF Author: Susan Stewart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679220X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book

Book Description
"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"--

The Ruins Lesson

The Ruins Lesson PDF Author: Susan Stewart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663261X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, myths and rituals of fertility, images of decay in early modern allegory and melancholy, the ruins craze of the eighteenth century, and the creation of “new ruins” for gardens and other structures. Stewart focuses particularly on Renaissance humanism and Romanticism, periods of intense interest in ruins that also offer new frames for their perception. The Ruins Lesson looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing art. Ruins, Stewart concludes, arise at the boundaries of cultures and civilizations. Their very appearance depends upon an act of translation between the past and the present, between those who have vanished and those who emerge. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

Love in the Ruins

Love in the Ruins PDF Author: Walker Percy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453216200
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
DIVDIV“A great adventure . . . So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless.” —Chicago Sun Times/divDIV/divDIVIn Walker Percy’s future America, the country is on the brink of disaster. With citizens violently polarized along racial, political, and social lines, and a fifteen-year war still raging abroad, America is crumbling quickly into ruin. The country’s one remaining hope is Dr. Thomas More, whose “lapsometer” is capable of diagnosing the spiritual afflictions—anxiety, depression, alienation—driving everyone’s destructive and disastrous behavior./divDIV /divDIVBut such a potent machine has its pitfalls. As Dr. More soon learns, in the wrong hands, the powerful lapsometer could lead to open warfare, pushing America into anarchy at full-speed./div /div

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature PDF Author: Andrew Hui
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823273369
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. For humanists, the ruin became the material sign that marked the rupture between themselves and classical antiquity. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Andrew Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future.

After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006

After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006 PDF Author: Mark Klett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520245563
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A collection of essays accompany this collection of photos of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake and fire, juxtaposed with photos of the city today.

The Ruins of Us

The Ruins of Us PDF Author: Keija Parssinen
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062064495
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
More than two decades after moving to Saudi Arabia and marrying powerful Abdullah Baylani, American-born Rosalie learns that her husband has taken a second wife. That discovery plunges their family into chaos as Rosalie grapples with leaving Saudi Arabia, her life, and her family behind. Meanwhile, Abdullah and Rosalie’s consuming personal entanglements blind them to the crisis approaching their sixteen-year-old son, Faisal, whose deepening resentment toward their lifestyle has led to his involvement with a controversial sheikh. When Faisal makes a choice that could destroy everything his embattled family holds dear, all must confront difficult truths as they fight to preserve what remains of their world. The Ruins of Us is a timely story about intolerance, family, and the injustices we endure for love that heralds the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in contemporary fiction.

Riches Among the Ruins

Riches Among the Ruins PDF Author: Robert P. Smith
Publisher: AMACOM/American Management Association
ISBN: 9780814410608
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Details the financial-oriented adventures of Robert P. Smith, who has made and lost millions by making risky investments in troubled economies around the world, and describes his trips to Baghdad, Vietnam, Guatemala, and other places.

On Longing

On Longing PDF Author: Susan Stewart
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313663
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
An analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world.

River of Ruin

River of Ruin PDF Author: Jack Du Brul
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101098015
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
In the heart of Panama, a volcanic lake feeds a serpentine river—its stone banks laid by the Inca, who took back the gold and jewels plundered from them by the conquistadors. Legend has it that the Twice-Stolen Treasure has been buried for centuries in the Panamanian jungle. Discovering it means surviving the unpredictable black waters of the River of Ruin.... It begins at a Paris auction house, with a favor granted by an old high school friend to geologist Philip Mercer: the opportunity to buy a rare diary written during the French attempt at digging the Panama Canal. But Mercer isn’t the only one who wants it. Three Chinese assassins have been dispatched to get it, forcing Mercer into a subterranean game of cat and mouse that takes him from the hellish maze of l’empire de la mort and through the sewers of Paris. Mercer realizes he has uncovered an intricate Chinese plot to trigger a deadly shift in the world’s balance of power. At stake is control of the canal, recently handed over to the government of Panama by the United States. Only Philip Mercer—with help from beautiful U.S. Army officer Lauren Vanik, a cell of tough French Foreign Legion commandos, and a crusty eighty-year-old retired sea captain named Harry White—can stop them.

The Shape of the Ruins

The Shape of the Ruins PDF Author: Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735211167
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE A sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions -- the much anticipated masterpiece from Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings. This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.