Relics of Modernity
eBook - PDF

Relics of Modernity

Theorizing Rhetorics and Performances of Ruins

  1. 233 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Relics of Modernity

Theorizing Rhetorics and Performances of Ruins

About this book

This collection of essays expands upon an emerging topic within and beyond the field of communication studies that challenges students and scholars of the built environment to peer beyond the somewhat typical collection of monuments, museums, and memories often found in essays related to space and place, to consider the role of ruins as lenses upon modernity. These locales, which include economic ghost towns, industrial relics, prison sites, and other places associated with so-called dark tourism generally conjure feelings of melancholy, connotations of failure. While their assemblages of moldy floors, waterlogged walls, shattered windows, and sagging roofs do not make for traditional tourist snapshots, ruins possess a potential to inspire awe, an awareness of the tenuous nature of modern confidence, a reverence for the passing of things. In their inquiry and investigation, one may encounter oddly sublime traces and fragments of the contemporary age. Seeking to better understand the rhetoric and performances of ruins, contributors to this book have crafted chapters that are theoretically sophisticated and vividly authored. The resulting collection of nine essays surveys ruins within and beyond the United States to examine a unique and unexpected constellation of ideas related to authenticity, identity, memory, representation, and power.

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Yes, you can access Relics of Modernity by Andrew F. Wood in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Series Page
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Contents
  7. Introduction
  8. Chapter 1: On the Ruins of a Black Utopia: Moving Memories of Buxton, Iowa
  9. Chapter 2: Communicative Spaces of Abjection: Rust, Ruination, and Renewal in Gary, Indiana
  10. Chapter 3: Performing Industrial Heritage in the Ruins of Bethlehem Steel
  11. Chapter 4: “Today I Found a Rotting Experimental Prison in the Woods”: Reassessing Ruins of the Past for the Sake of the Prese t
  12. Chapter 5: Restoration Rhetoric and the Ruins of Nauvoo: Creation, Memory, Destruction, and Modernity
  13. Chapter 6: A Discursive Ruin of Modernity: Exploring Motivations for Dark Tourism at the Colosseum
  14. Chapter 7: Rhetoric of Memories at Alcatraz National Park: Mediated Texts and Experiencing Dark Tourism
  15. Chapter 8: Manufactured Ruins: Tourism, Comfort Colonialism, and Imperial Nostalgia within Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom
  16. Chapter 9: Ruins, Remembrance, and Pedagogy: Teaching the Topography of Terror
  17. Index
  18. About the Authors