Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them, are acts framed by a long tradition. This collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins.
This interdisciplinary work uses the concept of the ruin as an approach to the study of modernity, asking whether there is an intrinsic logic of "ruin" at work in modernity.
