Relics of Modernity : Theorizing Rhetorics and Performances of Ruins

This book explores ruins whose intersections of symbolic messaging and material experience critique the modern project. By investigating ghost towns, industrial relics, prison sites, and other locales associated with dark tourism, contributors provide unique insights into contemporary rhetorics and performances of public life.

This collection of essays expands upon an emerging topic within and beyond the field of communication studies that challenges students and scholars of the built environment to peer beyond the somewhat typical collection of monuments, museums, and memories often found in essays related to space and place, to consider the role of ruins as lenses upon modernity. These locales, which include economic ghost towns, industrial relics, prison sites, and other places associated with so-called dark tourism generally conjure feelings of melancholy, connotations of failure. While their assemblages of moldy floors, waterlogged walls, shattered windows, and sagging roofs do not make for traditional tourist snapshots, ruins possess a potential to inspire awe, an awareness of the tenuous nature of modern confidence, a reverence for the passing of things. In their inquiry and investigation, one may encounter oddly sublime traces and fragments of the contemporary age. Seeking to better understand the rhetoric and performances of ruins, contributors to this book have crafted chapters that are theoretically sophisticated and vividly authored. The resulting collection of nine essays surveys ruins within and beyond the United States to examine a unique and unexpected constellation of ideas related to authenticity, identity, memory, representation, and power.