Overview

 For many of us, ruins are alluring, puzzling and endlessly fascinating: this elegant book seeks to explore why. What is it that makes us suspicious of works or histories that are too smooth, too continuous? Is it that urban experience is inherently discontinuous and fragmented, or that the only truths we can believe are partial ones? Whether focusing on ancient ormodern remnants, literature or the visual arts, Ruins and Fragments is poetic without being sentimental. It offers new ways of understanding the history of modernity, while delighting in its reading of the world as a puzzle, and the ways in which we can reconstruct new forms of meaning.

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9781780234472

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A marvelous story-teller and shorer of fragments, Robert Harbison surveys the destiny of ruins from Oxyrynchus to the films of Ozu, to Phimai and beyond. Yet his underlying concern remains the aftermath of war, cruelty, suffering the perpetual assault of human folly upon human constructions and the history of our often poorly conceived attempts to rebuild. Harbison has composed a spell-binding meditation on the inevitability of fragmentation and dispersal. --Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities and Director, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts

Author Information

Until his retirement in 2011 Robert Harbison was Professor of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is also the author of Reflections on Baroque (Reaktion, 2000) and Travels in the History of Architecture (Reaktion, 2010).

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