Rust

by Jean-Michel Rabaté, Christopher Schaberg (Editor), Ian Bogost (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 Rabaté 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 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, senior curator of Slought Foundation, one of the editors of the Jourbanal of Modern Literature, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored or edited forty books and collections on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and aesthetics.

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

“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