Aleksandra Prica, "Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

The University of Chicago Press Podcast · Jan 21, 2022 · 55m

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: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (U Chicago Press, 2022) 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…