Relics of Modernity

Theorizing Rhetorics and Performances of Ruins

Andrew F. Wood

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
12 June 2025

Material culture

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary Rhetoric

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.

Edited by: Andrew F. Wood
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781666942682
ISBN 10: 1666942685
Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary Rhetoric
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 12 June 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Andrew F. Wood is professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University in California.