Building Modern Antiquity

Hymns and Laments for Athens
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-05393-6
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 214 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 493 g

Reihe: Visual Modernities

This book considers post-19th-century Athens as a unique instance of a secret side of metropolitan capitalism. With a focus on modern antiquity as the hidden element of the dialectic between the past and the present, it suggests that the sociological study of one of the great European capital cities – a city not intended as a modern capital – and its architectural representations may expose part of the veiled processes of the reconstruction of the past, thus shedding light on the abuse of antiquity for the celebration of European capitalist metropolitan modernity. From the "glorious" white-marble cityscape of the 19th century that aimed at "re-enchanting" metropolitan modernity, to the inglorious grey reinforced-concrete 21st-century metropolis, modern Athens exposes the battle between the modern and a modern image of antiquity: a false, socially constructed historiography born of the dialectics between the ancient and the modern, the new and the old, collective memory and collective forgetting. As such, The Building of a Modern Antiquity will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in social and critical theory, urban studies, sociology of architecture, and visual sociology.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Giannakopoulou, Georgia

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Gesellschaftstheorie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction – Whose Athens?

Chapter 1 – Modern Antiquity and the Celebration of the Past

Chapter 2 – Modern Antiquity and the Rejection of the Past

Chapter 3 – Modern Antiquity and the Annihilation of the Past

Chapter 4 – Building Modern Ancient Athens

Chapter 5 – Celebrating Athens

Chapter 6 – Lamenting Athens

Conclusion – Our Athens

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Georgia Giannakopoulou is Assistant Professor in Sociology at The American College of Greece. She specializes in classical sociological theory and the sociology of architecture. She is the co-editor (with Greame Gilloch) of The Detective of Modernity: Essays on the Work of David Frisby.