Reclaiming Modernity

Essays on a Paradoxical Nostalgia

Larry Bennett

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English

University of Illinois Press
25 February 2025

Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus; History of architecture; History of the Americas; Urban communities

Why do we seek to return to the past or rescue pieces of the past that may have value in the present? Why does nostalgia attach to an approach to the world, social rules, and material products that willfully rejected the past?

Larry Bennett explores the complexities of nostalgia with considerations of the historic preservation of brutalist architecture, specifically Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago; the memoirs and recollections of early and mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn and Detroit; and the turntable’s rebirth as a musical instrument alongside the vinyl LP’s resurgence as a prized way of consuming music. Bennett tracks modernity as expressed through ideas, artistic products, and widespread social practices. His consideration of nostalgia focuses on our inclination to rediscover value in people, places, and social habits diminished by the passage of time.

Provocative and multidisciplinary, Reclaiming Modernity delves into the paradox of how we feel nostalgia for ideas and times that emerged from an impulse to shun nostalgia.

By: Larry Bennett
Imprint: University of Illinois Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9780252088483
ISBN 10: 0252088484
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 25 February 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface Three Modernities The Historic Preservation of Not-Old Buildings Two Lost Cities Unruly Products Nostalgia for Modernity Notes Index

Larry Bennett is a professor emeritus at DePaul University and the author of The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism.

Reviews for Reclaiming Modernity: Essays on a Paradoxical Nostalgia

"""Bennett explores an essential contradiction about modernism and modernity: that there is often nostalgia for a cultural movement that, by definition, eschews nostalgia. He leans into contemporary debates about whether 'recent past' buildings and other modernist technologies such as the vinyl LP should be preserved and embraced while presenting his arguments in prose that is polished, confident, and a pleasure to read.""--Rachel Weber, author of From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago"