The Ruins Lesson

Why is it, Susan Stewart asks in her deeply researched and gracefully written book The Ruins Lesson, that 'we so often are drawnin schadenfreude, terror, or what we imagine is transcendenceto 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 critica skill on full display in her new book. -- Robyn Creswel * The New York Review of Books * "Stewart, a distinguished poet, a former MacArthur fellow and a Princeton professor of the humanities, charts the Wests 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 nonspecialists 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 * "Poet and critic Susan Stewarts scholarly meditation on ruin and monument, The Ruins Lesson, couldnt be more topical, in our time of activist iconoclasm." -- A.E. Stallings * Times Literary Supplement * Susan Stewarts 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 * Ruins werent always valued primarily as objects of mood and pleasure. But theyve long held some form of aesthetic interest in the West. This history, culminating in the Romantic period, is the subject of Stewarts 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 * Stewarts new book details the long history of Western fascination of contemplating what Shakespeare describes (in Sonnet 55) as unswept stone besmeard 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 clear. -- Erin L. Thompson * Los Angeles Review of Books * "Susan Stewarts new book has a finely wrought section on the Romantics, but the special interest of this book is its transhistorical scope and imaginative amplitude. For forty years now, [Stewart] has been one of our most admired poet-critics. . . . This latest title arrives as an elegiac, crowning monument on the perennial entanglement between les mots et les choses of European civilization. This is simply the best work on the aesthetics of ruins out there." -- Andew Hui * Critical Inquiry * [A] minutely researched and beautifully written study of the enduring allure of ruins and ruination in Western culture. Poised between preservation and obliteration, ruins represent both a presence and an absence that give rise to a range of complex and sometimes contradictory responses. Stewart contemplates Western ruin app

Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and a former MacArthur Fellow. Among her many books of prose are On Longing, The Open Studio, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, and The Poets Freedom. Her books of poems include Columbarium, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cinder.

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Valuing Ruin I. Matter: This Ruined Earth II. Marks: Inscriptions and Spolia III. Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and WhoresOn the Ruin of Women IV. Matrix: Humanism and the Rise of the Ruins Print V. Model: The Architectural Imaginary VI. Mirrors: The Voyages and Fantasies of the Ruins Craze VII. The Unfinished: On the Nonfinality of Certain Works of Art VIII. Resisting Ruin: The Decay of Monuments and the Promises of Language Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Photography Credits Name Index Subject Index