Ruins have long evoked complex and layered emotions: sweetness, melancholy, wonder, and a sense of fatality. Yet the reasons for these compelling feelings remain fascinating to explore. The ruin functions as a central aesthetic, philosophical, and political concern in modernity, understood variously as a vehicle for sublimity, an indicator of historical catastrophes and abandoned visions of the future, an evocation of colonial nostalgia, an imperative to remember, and a metaphor for contemporary historical consciousness. What creates the enduring allure of the ruin, and how have visual and textual representations of ruins, along with associated themes of decay, fragmentation, and abandonment, shaped cultural and political imaginaries across time? How did the status and meaning of the ruin transform in response to the unprecedented material destruction of the twentieth century, and the corresponding focus on preservation, restoration, and monumentalization? How is the image of the ruin related to its materiality, and the forces–preservation, destruction, neglect–that sustain and produce it? What does it signify to inhabit the ruins and ruins-in-the-making of environmental catastrophe?
In this course, we will study the ruin as an aesthetic object, a conceptual object, and a spatial practice, drawing on diverse visual, literary, and architectural works alongside theoretical and historical texts. We will examine the status of the ruin within eighteenth-century theories of the picturesque and the sublime, and its recurring presence as a motif in Romantic literature and visual art. We will analyze theoretical and cultural texts informed by twentieth-century ruinscapes, ranging from the philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin to the narratives of J.G. Ballard and the cinematography of Andrei Tarkovsky. Special focus will be directed toward understanding how ruins are mobilized, celebrated, and naturalized by reactionary political movements and regimes. Finally, we will investigate the contemporary role of ruins in relation to preservation practices, cultural heritage, environmental destruction, and adaptive reuse. Course readings will likely include works by Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Julia Hell, Andreas Huyssen, Ariella Azoulay, Ann Laura Stoler, Lucia Allais, and Svetlana Boym, among others.
