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Maandeeq, or she-camel, is the most recognizable and dominant metaphor for the Somali nation-state, a symbol conceived and institutionalized through classical pastoral poetry. This article examines how Somali poets of the twentieth century made use of another metaphor to consider the anxieties of independence and the founding paradoxes of the Somali state: the metaphor of qabyo. Unlike the binary offered by the stable figure of maandeeq--she's either dead or alive, stolen or reclaimed, shared or contested--qabyo attends to the incongruent, overlapping, and cyclical forms of ruination and repair that subtend the makings of the Somali state. Moreover, by contesting the determinism of failure narratives and instead focusing on the daily labor required to conduct a life in the ruins of history, qabyo poetics, I argue, advances a sociopolitical theory of the Somali subject as one who must learn to survive ruinous time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ten years after the popular uprising that became a brutal war, Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian authors are engaged in the struggle to craft a historical consciousness that can acknowledge and mourn for their recent revolutionary past without reifying it. As they write in and of material, political, and social ruin, their works echo collective traumas in regional memory: the Palestinian nakba , the rise of Syria's Assad regime, Lebanon's civil war, the 2003 occupation of Iraq, and more. The ruin appears cruelly recursive, yet it is arrested in the corpus of works discussed in this article: poetry by Firas Sulaiman and Osama Esber; prose by Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Samer Yazbek, and Ra'id Wahsh; and documentary film by the Abounaddara Collective. Drawing on Arabic poetic modernism and regional politics, I argue that ruin imagery—ranging from war's rubble to ancient artefacts—carries distinctive structures of temporal anticipation in Syrian literary and cultural memory. The writers and filmmakers discussed deploy formal and thematic means of stasis and repetition, displacement and accumulation, to summon these temporal structures—only to refuse, interrupt, and reroute them. I argue that such poetic engineerings of the images of ruin assert the singularity of the Syrian present within broader collective memories of ruin. As such, they raise a historicizing challenge to the current academic dominance of reading ruin imagery, notably from the Middle East, through an imperial lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the theories of ruins and entanglements and the key role played by textiles in African history. Also cited are how the pulling of threads in weaving symbolizes a controlled manipulation of cultural fabric of societies, the works of Stuart Hall to promote the lives of the Caribbean people, as well as the relationship between ruins and mental well-being.

This study inserts Santiago, Chile, into contemporary discussions of colonial Latin America by reading two Jesuit documents—a map and a letter—created prior to and following the devastating earthquake of 1647, respectively. Alonso de Ovalle’s Prospectiva y planta de la ciudad de Santiago (1646) presents an urban paradise in accordance with Spanish and Catholic ideals, a New World Jerusalem. This depiction is juxtaposed with a letter by Juan González Chaparro that describes postearthquake Santiago as “ruined at the powerful hand of the Almighty.” Focusing on the 1647 earthquake’s religious dimensions and perceived causes, the study concludes that the religious authorities of Santiago stand out in the colonial Spanish Americas for assigning fault for such a disaster to their city’s elites rather than to its underclasses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the decaying spaces in the U.S. South in the novels of author William Faulkner. Also cited are the ruins of large plantation houses in the 1929 novel "Sartoris" (Flags in the Dust), how the ruined barns reflected the shift to industrialized farming in the novel, and some other Faulkner works like "Absalom Absalom!," "Light in August," and "The Unvanquished."

The article offers information on the fragment in literature. It mentions that interrogative "when" stands at the edge of answerability and the drama of this fragment lies in what is not articulated, thought suspended like a held breath. It discusses the provocative binary between fragments and ruins.

This hybrid autobiographical/critical paper takes its cue from Yvonne Owuor's paper in this volume, "Reading our Ruins: A Rough Sketch." In her piece, Owuor combines a meditation on ruins—as physical, human, social and political—with the perspective of an autopsy, or "seeing for oneself". In my paper I try to "see for myself" and in myself what it means to consider the ruins of District Six and the responses, individual and institutional, to its violent destruction. More specifically, I try to account for a recent oral history project completed by the District Six Museum which resulted in the writing of a food story and cookbook, District Six Huis Kombuis Tafel: Food and Memory Stories Cookbook (2016). My paper intersperses this critical account with italicised fragments of my own memoir (a work in progress) on District Six, apartheid's psychic violence, home and food, that relate directly or tangentially to the critical segments. The memoir fragments provide a parallel tale of inner life that at times relates to and supplements the critical discourse, but also at times casts it into doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of eHumanista is the property of Professor Antonio Cortijo-Ocana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A literary criticism of the novel "The Rebels, or Boston before the Revolution," by Lydia Maria Child is presented. Topics discussed include the exploration of fragmentary ruins and historical narrative and its connection with the novel's historiography and political concept, the relation between masculinized history and feminized fictional realm, and the exploration and portrayal of the characters.

Ruins evoke meditations, and none more than those of Rome. Not only historians from Gibbon to Toynbee have been inspired by those ruins. Writers of the German Classical period from Goethe to Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and A.W. Schlegel, not to mention Ludwig I of Bavaria or August von Platen, have reflected in their poems on the glory of that Roman past and its meaning for the present. The German Romantics, in contrast, shifted their gaze from antiquity to the Middle Ages and to such monuments as the castles of Heidelberg, Weibertreu, and Marienburg and the monastic ruins of Eldena and Sankt Wolfgang. Poets from Brentano and Chamisso to Eichendorff and Kerner regarded them not so much as cultural-historical treasures for the cultivated few but, rather, as popular symbols of nationalistic pride and future unification. Classicists and Romantics alike sought to preserve those pasts through memory and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Canadian writers have shown remarkably little interest in the Americas below the United States, identifying far more with the Northern Hemisphere than with the Western one. The Toronto author William Richard Harris (1846-1923) is one notable exception. A Catholic priest and an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, Harris devoted his four popular travel books primarily to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Fascinated with ruins, he was profoundly affected by the remnants of the architectural wonders that he encountered during his treks. However, partly because of his orthodox religious views on human origins, Harris was never fully able to accept that the builders of those once majestic structures were directly related to modern Indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I shall consider the way in which the nature of writing and inscription suggests a new reading of the ruin, where text is indicative of a fundamental ontological chiasm or flickering. The notion of the Fragment is important here, wrestling it from the domain of the Romantic ruin to review its role in the ruin's being and put forward the fragment as an independent entity, eschewing both totality and linear temporality. In this way, the ruin is seen more as a threshold mandating a different and chiasmic experience of time, including deferral, disruption and incompletion withal. Using the modalities of objects including dust, air and stone, I suggest that the Anthropocene mandates a reappraisal of the standard view of the ruin as a static representative of progress or lack thereof. By using the poetics of Thomas Stearns Eliot, and both Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot's work on the irreducibility and temporal undulation of writing, amongst others, I suggest writing as an object that shares and reflects a deeply shattered ontological state that oscillates in the same space as the fragmented ruin, and further, how writing itself originates in and on stone, the stuff of the traditional ruin. Dust and ash materialize ruin and writing, underlining a fragmented ontological equivocation, where writing could be seen as a performative form of ruin. This is thought additionally to suggest a less anthropocentric view of the human both within and on the earth and how the idea of ruin might be relevant to thinking being, mandating a reappraisal of how non-human objects might think in a possible interconnectedness. In this essay I shall consider the way in which the nature of writing and inscription suggests a new reading of the ruin, where text is indicative of a fundamental ontological chiasm or flickering. The notion of the Fragment is important here, wrestling it from the domain of the Romantic ruin to review its role in the ruin's being and put forward the fragment as an independent entity, eschewing both totality and linear temporality. In this way, the ruin is seen more as a threshold mandating a different and chiasmic experience of time, including deferral, disruption and incompletion withal. Using the modalities of objects including dust, air and stone, I suggest that the Anthropocene mandates a reappraisal of the standard view of the ruin as a static representative of progress or lack thereof. By using the poetics of Thomas Stearns Eliot, and both Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot's work on the irreducibility and temporal undulation of writing, amongst others, I suggest writing as an object that shares and reflects a deeply shattered ontological state that oscillates in the same space as the fragmented ruin, and further, how writing itself originates in and on stone, the stuff of the traditional ruin. Dust and ash materialize ruin and writing, underlining a fragmented ontological equivocation, where writing could be seen as a performative form of ruin. This is thought additionally to suggest a less anthropocentric view of the human both within and on the earth and how the idea of ruin might be relevant to thinking being, mandating a reappraisal of how non-human objects might think in a possible interconnectedness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent publication of the translation of Jacques Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains, a small volume of photographs and commentary, affords an opportunity to probe Derrida’s reflections on death and therefore on life as well. Looking at photographs and objects of everyday life, Derrida emphasizes the deferred yet certain nature of death and the way in which this deferral opens the opportunity to devote ourselves to life. His grounding of his philosophical and deconstructionist argument in contemplation of material fragments (the photographs of ruins and scenes from the recent past of Athens) invites a comparison with the writing of sociologist Georg Simmel on ruins, time and death. Both writers attempt to discover practices of survival, the techne of affirming life in the face of death. For both of them these practices are sociological as well as philosophical, individual as well as collective, and aesthetic as well as intellectual. While their reflections thematically converge, their strategies for the affirmation of life are not identical, and we contrast Derrida’s approach, rooted in a concept of being in the world and a connection to others, to Simmel’s analysis which is focused on the role of culture and the force of the human spirit. Reconstructing a conversation between Derrida and Simmel and examining their intellectual rapprochement deepen our thinking about temporality and death as we confront the question ‘How are we to live?’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the aesthetics of ruins in relation to Romantic aesthetics. Topics include art historian Alois Riegl's thought on the historicity of ruins from an aesthetic perspective, the fragmentary nature of ruins as artistic objects, and art critic Linda Nochlin's interpretation of the drawing "The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins" by Henry Fuseli. Also addressed the poem "An Elegy on a Pile of Ruins" by John Cunningham, the relation of the passage of time to aesthetic valuation, and the aesthetic thought of philosopher Immanuel Kant.

This article considers literary and antiquarian responses to the ruins at Netley Abbey, Hampshire, between the years 1750 and 1830. Having situated poetic responses to Netley in relation to William Gilpin's theories of the Picturesque, the article claims that it was at precisely such a site of architectural ruin that the Gothic imagination was articulated. Beyond this, the article demonstrates that the Gothic ruins at Netley Abbey became an important site in the rise of ' Gothic tourism', the dark and spectral equivalent to Romanticism's Picturesque tour in the latter half of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have tended to treat the crucial leitmotif of ruins in E. M. Forster in terms of an unremitting nostalgia or melancholia. This paper argues that Forster's relationship to spatial damage, destruction, and loss is much more complicated and capacious-anguished and mournful, but also mingled with certain provisional compensations, even pleasures. What troubles matters, the essay contends, is a subtle but recurrent association throughout Forster's writing between ruins and queer sexuality: a coupling that emerges in Howards End (1910), Maurice (1913-1914), the "letter" to Mohammed el-Adl (1922-1929), and the short story, "The Obelisk" (1939). In these works, we find a topography of queerly coded ruination that sheds light on otherwise overlooked dimensions of Forster's treatment of architecture, sexuality, time, secrecy and publicity, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the treatment of ruins in the works of two late eighteenth-century Picturesque writers, Carlo Castone della Torre di Rezzonico and Aurelio de’ Giorgi Bertola, linking the idea of melancholy associated with the ruin to pre-Romantic conceptions of time and nature and to developments in literary aesthetics. It argues that both writers stretch the boundaries of the Picturesque by using the depiction of ruins in a natural setting as a temporal presence that evokes the passage and effects of time, triggering a melancholic response. Their melancholy of ruins articulates a modern sensibility defined by the recognition of an irreparable rupture with the past and with nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World My Wilderness (1950) is a painful meditation on the social and material ruins of the Second World War. The novel's chronotope of ruins creates a palimpsest of physical, psychic, and textual dereliction. During the Blitz, air raids uncovered ancient ruins while creating new ones out of present-day buildings and infrastructure. This peculiar archaeological environment resonates with what philosophers have theorized as a ruin's multidirectional, suspended temporality. Like several other books of 'ruin-mapping' in the immediate postwar period, Macaulay's novel renders this dislocated setting through a cartographic treatment of Blitzed London. Ultimately, the novel complicates conventional ways of reading both the metropolis and the Bildungsroman by emphasizing war's creation of surrogate habitats, and the residual, destructive effects on youth and maturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS)) is the property of Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the novella "The Metamorphosis," by Franz Kafka and how it has been manipulated by digital media almost 100 years after its publication. The authors discuss the concept of ruins within the book, explore how the protagonist Gregor Samsa is interpreted by contemporary culture, and compare the book to the song "Bad Romance," by Lady Gaga.

A literary criticism of the 19th century novel "Salammbô" by Gustave Flaubert is presented. The author analyzes its themes of massacre, self-destruction, melancholy, and ruins and suggests that the novel is about the spread of violence and barbaric acts. The story being set in the extinct city of Carthage, Tunisia, its multinational element, its imagery, and its various degrees of violence are discussed.

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The city of Havana and the island of Cuba are two important sites in the cultural cartography of the Atlantic world whose significance has been felt from at least the sixteenth century on. This piece investigates how the trope of the ruins of Havana in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature create notions of space and time that both rupture and create a transnational idea of Cuba. The layering of memory, identity, and history onto the image of the ruins of Havana allow for several cartographies of meaning to be located in these specific sites of decay. This kind of locating operates in a Havana imaginary that embeds the ruins within a contiguous transatlantic project that necessarily includes Afro-Atlantic ways of understanding the world, magic and religion. In this essay, I look at how representations of the ruins of Havana and Afro-Cuban religion work together in especially literature by Cuban and Cuban diaspora authors to signify a process of re-working history, place, and the nature of time that destabilize linear narratives of the past and reaffirm the metaphysical potential of place. In other words, both the trope of the ruins of Havana and the representation of Afro-Cuban spaces here illustrate the transformative power of imagining Havana. This imagining takes on many different forms over time and in overlapping transatlantic projects that are contextualized here in a postcolonial historical framework that also takes into account Cuba's Caribbean, Latino/a, Afro-Atlantic, Asian, and Mediterranean influences. Also central to this investigation of the ruins of Havana is a critique of the role that gender plays in creating a paradigm for understanding the city and Afro-Cuban religious cultures in ways that are under examined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two essays are presented on ruins and hope written by María Zambrano, philosopher. These essays offer the author's literary style and her thoughts on their socio-historical and biographical context. The author proves her intellectual development through the passage of events in Spain's modern history. She relates the relation of ruins to hope to modern thinking that ruins embody a momentous event whose realization is always deferred.