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Item Number: 129818
Title: Ruin Memories : Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past
Author: Olsen, Bjornar ; Dora Petursdottir (eds)
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9780415523622
Description: New York: Routledge, 2014. 25cm., hardcover, 498pp. illus. Summary: The archaeology of the recent or contemporary past has grown fast during the last decade. This development has been concurrent with a broader popular, artistic and scholarly interest in modern ruins in general. Ruin Memories explores how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses, reassesses the cultural and historical value of modern ruins and suggests possible means for reaffirming their cultural and historic significance. Crucial for this reassessment is a concern with decay and ruination, and with the role things play in expressing the neglected, unsuccessful and ineffable. Abandonment and ruination is usually understood negatively through the tropes of loss and deprivation; things are degraded and humiliated while the information, knowledge and memory embedded in them become lost along the way. Without even ignoring its many negative and traumatizing aspects, a main question addressed in this book is whether ruination also can be seen as an act of disclosure. If ruination disturbs the routinized and ready-to-hand, to what extent can it also be seen as a recovery of memory as exposing meanings and presences that perhaps are only possible to grasp at second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality?

Contents: 1. Ruins – concepts, theories and attitudes 2. Modern ruins and heritage 3. Material memory 4. Aesthetics, art, attraction 5. Abandonment 6. Archaeologies of the recent past. (Archaeological Orientations)

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