Decay and Afterlife

Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900

Aleksandra Prica

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780226811598, 9780226811314
• eBook ISBN: 9780226811451
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins.
 
Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism's nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.
 

Footnotes

Introduction

1 Homer, Iliad 6.448–49.

2 Polybios, Histories (1995), 438–39. For full source citation of this and other works called out in text or notes, see the bibliography.

3 Hell, “Imperial Ruin Gazers” (2010), 170–71.

4 Hell, Conquest of Ruins (2019), 15. I will come back to this definition in the context of my reading of Freud in chapter 1. Catharine Edwards refers to the same scene but relates it to an expression of melancholy that is combined with Roman military power; see Edwards, “Imagining Ruins in Ancient Rome,” 646.

5 Heckscher, Die Romruinen; R. Zimmermann, Künstliche Ruinen.

6 Zucker, Fascination of Decay: Ruins; Relic–Symbol–Ornament. Given the vast number of studies on ruins, the following surveil of scholarly works is necessarily selective and therefore limited: Vogel, Die Ruine in der Darstellung der abendländischen Kunst; Müller, “Die Ruine in der deutschen und niederländischen Malerei des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts”; Simmen, Ruinen-Faszination in der Graphik vom 16. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart; Du Pérac and Wittkower, Disegni de le ruine di Roma e come anticamente erono; Syndram, Römische Skizzen: Zwischen Phantasie und Wirklichkeit.

7 Deger, Joachim Du Bellay; Caprio, Poesia e poetica delle rovine di Roma; Mortier, La poétique des ruines en France; Dällenbach and Nibbrig, Fragment und Totalität.

8 See Böhme, “Die Ästhetik der Ruinen” (1989); Simmel, “Die Ruine” (1996); Ginsberg, “Aesthetics of Ruins” (1970); Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins.

9 Melehy, “Du Bellay’s Time in Rome” (2001); Melehy, “Spenser and Du Bellay” (2003); Melehy, “Antiquities of Britain” (2005); Summit, “Topography as Historiography” (2000); Summit, “Monuments and Ruins” (2003); Vinken, Du Bellay und Petrarca; Hennigfeld, Der ruinierte Körper; Baker, “Ruin and Utopia.”

10 Somewhat random examples are Bühlbäcker, Konstruktive Zerstörungen; Stadler, “Bedeutend in jedem Fall”; Grätz, “‘Erhabne Trümmer’”; Schöning, “Zeit der Ruinen”; Baum, Ruinenlandschaften.

11 Van Reijen, Allegorie und Melancholie; Emden, “Walter Benjamins Ruinen der Geschichte.” See also Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1991).

12 See Bolz and Van Reijen, Ruinen des Denkens—Denken in Ruinen; Boym, Future of Nostalgia. Lacroix, Ce que nous disent les ruines, hypostatizes the Enlightenment as the era in which the perception of ruins changed radically and became part of modernity’s criticism of classical metaphysics; Ginsberg’s 2004 monograph The Aesthetics of Ruins (not to be confused with the 1970 essay of the same title) is a voluminous work on the perception of ruins, which—against a philosophical background and in systematizing, almost encyclopedic fashion—spreads out into a variety of cultural areas and humanistic fields, and can be regarded as philosophical and cultural-theoretical in character.

13 Turner, “Ruine und Fragment”; Sugrue, “City of Ruins” (2010); Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present; Cupperi, Senso delle rovine e riuso dell’antico; Zadek, “Der Palatin in den Publikationen Hieronymus Cocks”; Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction; Siegmund, Die romantische Ruine im Landschaftsgarten; Vöckler, Die Architektur der Abwesenheit.

14 Examples are Assmann, Gomille, and Rippl, Ruinenbilder; Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity; Stoler, Imperial Debris; Kocziszky, Ruinen in der Moderne; Bolz and Van Reijen, Ruinen des Denkens; Dillon, Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art; even though published before 1989, Dällenbach and Nibbrig’s Fragment und Totalität belongs in this group too. This is the case even for works that claimed to privilege texts; see, e.g., Forero-Mendoza, Le temps des ruines. Michel Makarius’s 2004 volume Ruins includes paintings, drawings, architecture, photography, and literature of the past six hundred years.

15 Christopher Woodward’s In Ruins (2001) is a case in point.

16 Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History” (1982), 409.

17 I am specifically referring to the Aristotelian and Platonic tradition. There has been a wealth of excellent research on form in recent years. The most important publications for this study are David Wellbery’s “Romanticism and Modernity” (2010) and “Form und Idee” (2014). Also see Maskarinec, Forces of Form in German Modernism; Levine, Forms; Kornbluh, Order of Forms.

18 See Wellbery, “Romanticism and Modernity,” 276.

19 To emphasize my understanding of form, I shall indicate in my readings those cases in which writers themselves draw on the distinction between form and content.

20 For example, see Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. “ruina,” 1666–67, and “ruo,” 1669; Georges, Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, s.v. “ruina,” 2422–23, and “ruo,” 2428–29.

21 For instance, there is no entry for ruina in Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, or in Blaise, Lexicon Latinitatis medii aevi. Du Cange lists the noun ruinatio, translated as “destruction” from fifteenth-century sources (vol. 7, col. 235a). See also Zadek, “Der Palatin in den Publikationen Hieronymus Cocks, 82–86; Assmann, Gomille, and Rippl, Ruinenbilder, 7–14.

22 Dekkers, The Way of all Flesh.

23 Didi-Huberman, “Artistic Survival” (2003), 273. Didi-Huberman alleges that Gombrich’s Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography was an attempt to make sure that the “hypothesis of survival not survive” (276) but th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• i   Foundations
• ii   The Propitious Moment
• iii   Living On
• iv   The Battleground of Time
• v   Futures and Ruins
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes