Rust

by Jean-Michel Rabaté, Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabate´ combines art, science, and autobiography to share his fascination with peeling paints and rusty metal sheets. Rust, he concludes, is a place where things living, built, and remembered commingle.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501329494
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/08/2018
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	4.60(w) x 6.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of the world's foremost literary theorists. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Rabaté has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound, and Joyce. Recent books include Crimes of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Literature (2014), The Pathos of Distance (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Rust (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is one of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org) and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. How to Live with Global Rust
2. Hegel and Ruskin, from the Inorganic to the Organic
3. Interlude: Blood-work
4. Rats and Jackals, Kafka after von Hofmannsthal
5. Aesthetics of Rust
Conclusion: Fougères to Marseilles: Green Rust or Edible Rouille?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Rabate counters our instinctively negative view of rust with a surprisingly wide variety of examples drawn from philosophy as well as the arts and sciences for a strikingly and broadly convincing argument as to the merits of rust … Rabate presents rust as an imperfection with unlimited possibilities. He clarifies its role in our lives and complicates how we value its role. He brings readers his family rouille recipe and the news that someday soon, science may give us a green rust capable of cleaning our water and soil … He provides plenty of food for thought as we run into these references across daily life.” —PopMatters

“This is a witty, delightfully eclectic fantasy and fugue on the theme of rust, which, it turns out, is a perfect metaphor for an aesthetics of metamorphosis in and after modernism. Rust has the ruddy glow of active thinking in the process of self-transformation. Rust not only doesn't sleep, it never stops giving off sparks.” —Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA

“Through his elegant alchemical associations, Rabaté spins Rust to gold.” —Vanessa Place, artist and criminal defense attorney

“Rust has its fascinating moments, those deeply poetic instants where metaphor becomes real and you get a tiny glimpse of the wonder that can reside inside seemingly ordinary items.” —San Francisco Book Review

From the Publisher