2005, Ruins of Modernity
This conference is jointly organized by the Institute for the Humanities and the Center for European Studies, and involves collaboration with the Center of Russian and East European Studies and other units on campus. This conference will analyze the entanglement of political, philosophical, and aesthetic discourse that the ruin as a side or meta trope of modernity has generated. Poised at the symbolic end of the project of modernity, we will ponder the ways in which the ruin intersects with the two major axes of modernity: the divide between the east and the west, which has produced distinct variants of modernity, and the asymmetry between hegemonic and subaltern cultures, which continues to produce more ruins.
