The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture

Product Description
How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.
Review \n“Why is it, Susan Stewart asks in her deeply researched and gracefully written book
The Ruins Lesson, that 'we so often are drawn—in schadenfreude, terror, or what we imagine is transcendence—to the sight of what is broken, damaged, and decayed?'. . . . Stewart is among our most erudite readers of poetry. She is a philologist in the old-fashioned sense: a scholar who combines knowledge of several European and classical languages, a historical awareness of the development and interaction of their literary traditions, and a commitment to philosophical aesthetics that one feels even in her close readings. But she is also a poet, and writes with unfaltering clarity and poise. Finally (a word Stewart might object to), she is a discerning art critic—a skill on full display in her new book.”
-- Robyn Creswel ―
The New York Review of Books\n"Stewart, a distinguished poet, a former MacArthur fellow and a Princeton professor of the humanities, charts the West’s fascination with decayed remains, from Egyptian relics to contemporary monuments of destruction and trauma.
The Ruins Lesson is a sweeping cultural history that draws in Renaissance humanism, 18th-century changes in representing the past and the Romantic reconfiguration of memory. . . . Stewart writes with poetic grace and a nonspecialist’s appreciation of printmaking, painting, literature and architecture. Readers outside the academy will find much to value in this lovely book.”
-- Michael S. Roth ―
The Washington Post\n"Poet and critic Susan Stewart’s scholarly meditation on ruin and monument,
The Ruins Lesson, couldn’t be more topical, in our time of activist iconoclasm."
-- A.E. Stallings ―
Times Literary Supplement\n“Susan Stewart’s
The Ruins Lesson tells the story of antiquarians and what they learned from the ruins that obsessed them. Their sensibility, as she shows, was itself ancient. . . .
The Ruins Lesson makes one point above all: there was no single dominant way of observing ancient ruins and portraying what remained.”
-- Anthony Grafton ―
London Review of Books\n“Ruins weren’t always valued primarily as objects of mood and pleasure. But they’ve long held some form of aesthetic interest in the West. This history, culminating in the Romantic period, is the subject of Stewart’s peripatetic study, an idiosyncratic expedition through the centuries. . . . As motivations, methods, and means vary across geography and history, what remains constant is this: ruins captivate, and ruins provoke a response.”
-- Nathan Goldman ―
Lapham's Quarterly\n“Stewart’s new book details the long history of Western fascination of contemplating what Shakespeare describes (in Sonnet 55) as ‘unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.’ . . . Stewart contends that the immediate emotional impact of looking at a ruin is a reminder of our own deaths, since, unlike a heap of rubble, a ruin bears some traces of what it once was before its fall. . . . . Stewart expects much of her readers, but her writing is also forceful and cl