Held on the 29th Mar 2019
at 5:30pm to
6:30pm
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ruins of the recent past have received increased attention worldwide, as seen in such diverse phenomena as the proliferating images of post-industrial Detroit, emerging pilgrimages to Chernobyl, and the documentation of post-Soviet architectural remains. This social and historical interest has been reflected in depictions of modern ruins in a growing corpus of fiction and poetry. This research investigates representations of modern urban ruins in contemporary literature and the role they play in the imaginative negotiation of ecological crisis. While considerable research has examined ruins in earlier literary periods — particularly in the Romantic era and in post-war Modernism, the current moment remains underexplored, and commands urgent scholarly attention in the context of environmental literary studies. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAdam, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, have become central texts in ecocriticism, and their representations of twentieth-century ruins play a key role in their ecological work. Throughout their narratives set in the future, Atwood and McCarthy consistently depict the built environment of the twentieth century as a ruin, with all the connotations of nostalgia, sublimity and collective admonition implied by the Romantic and Modernist heritage of the ruin-gaze. When their protagonists encounter decaying buildings it is not Turneresque stones they find, however, but the remains of malls, escalators, factories, and advertising signs for consumer products — products today’s readers might currently buy. This depiction of modern ruins plays a key role in the complex ecological interventions staged by these narratives: figuring contemporary buildings as ruins alienates readers from familiar landscapes (and the social and economic values of late capitalism they embody), creating a pre-emptive elegy for a world not yet lost.
About the speaker
Bridget Vincent completed her PhD in Literature at Cambridge University as a General Sir John Monash Scholar. After teaching at Cambridge she came back to Australia for a postdoctoral fellowship at Melbourne University, where she founded the Australian Youth Humanities Forum, designed to further public dialogue about the humanities. Bridget is now a Lecturer at the University of Nottingham, and spends some months each year in Australia, most recently as a National Library of Australia Fellow. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers program, and in 2017 received a British Academy Rising Star Award. Her first book is titled The Example of Poetry: Moral Authority and Exemplarity in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. She is currently working on two projects: one focused on literature and public apology, and one about the representation of modern ruins in contemporary fiction.
Environmental Change is a Research Group in the College of Arts, Law and Education, University of Tasmania. The group advances a Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS)-led approach to environmental change by understanding that the problems addressed by scientific research are constituted through cultural, social and political processes.
