Raquel Gutiérrez

Arts, Culture, Society II: In Ruins: Representing Infrastructure & Decay

Thursday, June 20, 2024, 4:30 to 5:45 p.m.

In the Western United States, ruins present themselves both as timely and untimely. In cultural discourse, as materials, they are often associated with quaint tourist attractions. As metaphor and process, however, they are timelier than ever before as they speak to the decay of the American dream and other myths associated with progress narratives of Western expansion and Manifest Destiny. This class will consider the ways in which ruins show up in contemporary literary and cultural productions. Essayist Miranda Trimmier writes of the common critique of ruin porn — that it tends to erase history and inspire myth. We will be exploring that critique in depth as we visit “places full of holes, landscapes with no past” (as visual artist Ed Ruscha writes in Course of Empire), and attempt to imagine the ghosts and structural conditions that haunt those locales. 

Required Reading (in Reader):

Johnson, Denis. Excerpt from “Dirty Wedding.” Jesus’ Son, Picador, 1992, p.84.

Rubenstein, Michael, et al. “Infrastructuralism: An Introduction.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 4, 2015, pp. 575–86. Crossref, doi:10.1353/mfs.2015.0049.

Toscano, Rodrigo. Excerpt from Explosion Rocks Springfield. Fence, 2016, p.4.

Trimmier, Miranda. “Cisco Trash Map.” Places Journal, 1 Feb. 2019.

 Available online at: placesjournal.org/article/cisco-trash-map/