An extended meditation on disruption and discontinuity in (largely) Western culture, on fractures, on remembering and forgetting what we have lost, and on the rough edges of our cultural world, from architecture to literature. Harbison proves a keen observer of the paradoxes of reconstruction.
Mary Beard Times Literary Supplement A marvelous story-teller and ... Read moreshorer of fragments, Robert Harbison surveys the destiny of ruins from Oxyrynchus to the films of Ozu, to Phimai and beyond. Yet his underlying concern remains the aftermath of war, cruelty, suffering the perpetual assault of human folly upon human constructions and the history of our often poorly conceived attempts to rebuild. Harbison has composed a spell-binding meditation on the inevitability of fragmentation and dispersal.
Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities and Director, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts Ruins and Fragments is a wonderfully alluring poem of absence: it weaves together such diverse strands as the language of Finnigan s Wake, the montage of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the aggressions of analytical Cubism and the reconstruction of the Warsaw Market Square into an enticing panorama of our perplexing times.
Joseph Rykwert, author of The Judicious Eye, The Seduction of Place and The Idea of a Town Ruins and Fragments is a wonderfully alluring poem of absence: it weaves together such diverse strands as the language of Finnigan s Wake, the montage of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the aggressions of analytical Cubism and the reconstruction of the Warsaw Market Square into an enticing panorama of our perplexing times.
Joseph Rykwert, author of The Judicious Eye, The Seduction of Place and The Idea of a Town Show Less