A Rhetoric of Ruins: Exploring Landscapes of Abandoned Modernity (Lexington Studies in Contemporary Rhetoric)

A Rhetoric of Ruins contributes to an interdisciplinary conversation about the role of wrecked and abandoned places in modern life. Topics in this book stretch from retro- and post-human futures to a Jeremiadic analysis of the role of ruins in American presidential discourse. From that foundation, A Rhetoric of Ruins employs hauntology to visit a California ghost-town, psychogeography to confront Detroit ruins, heterochrony to survey Pennsylvania’s once (and future) Graffiti Highway, an expanded articulation of heterotopia to explore the pleasurable contamination of Chernobyl, and an evening in Turkmenistan’s Doorway to Hell that stretches across time from Homer’s Iliad to Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Written to engage scholars and students of communication studies, cultural geography, anthropology, landscape studies, performance studies, public memory, urban studies, and tourism studies, A Rhetoric of Ruins is a conceptually rich and vividly written account of how broken and derelict places help us manage our fears in the modern era. Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 10 1: Yesterday’s Tomorrows 26 2: Post-­Human Futures 50 3: American Carnage 76 4: Bodie’s Ghostly Gaze 94 5: Detroit’s Guilty Pleasures 116 6: Centralia’s Graffiti Highway 136 7: Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone 152 8: The Doorway to Hell 182 Bibliography 196 Index 210 About the Author 218 "A Rhetoric of Ruins combines conceptual and theoretical frameworks to explore ghost towns, disaster sites, and environmental badlands as remnants of modernity. Methods of analysis include Jeremiadic, hauntological, psychogeographic, and heterotopian ways of reading U.S. and international sites"-- Provided by publisher