Decay and Afterlife

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 post-industrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, and instead focuses on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an 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 theoretically rich close readings, she traverses the longue dur?ee of 800 years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks Europe's ruins discourses as they metamorphose over time, identifying unremarked resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas these thinkers bring to light. Throughout, she asks, What persists in keeping the ruins of a once grand past alive?""--