Cities and Ruin in American Studies

There is a reflexive relationship between the image of the city and its ruination in American literature and culture. The city orders the way in which we conceive of the democratic experience, and its ruin exposes the problems inherent in that urban order. Far from being set up as an oppositional pair, the concept of “cities and ruins” instigates a semantic dance of interrelated meanings that informs our civic participation and our modes of passing into the future. This essay reviews three texts, recently published, that explore the renewed emphasis in American studies on the role of the city in literature and culture and the processes of its ruin: The City in American Literature and Culture, edited by Kevin McNamara, Miles Orvell’s Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction, and Andrew F. Wood’s A Rhetoric of Ruins: Exploring Landscapes of Abandoned Modernity.