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UAL Research Online

The Incident at Modane: What Have We Learned?

O'Kane, Paul (2011) The Incident at Modane: What Have We Learned? Third Text, 25 (3). pp. 269-279. ISSN 0952-8822

Type of Research: Article
Creators: O'Kane, Paul
Description:

Abstract:

This article uses a recent event – disruptions to tourism by 2009's Icelandic volcanic ash cloud – as a cultural pause within which to reflect on the nature of history and modernity. It asks how we look at history and what we look for in history. It compares today's tourists with those of the eighteenth-century ‘Grand Tour’ with an emphasis on Rome. It refers to the historical methods of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, and also to Sigmund Freud's ‘screen memories’. Films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Peter Bogdanovich appear before the probing meditations turn up a historic catastrophe in Modane, France; an event that then becomes symbolic of our plight as dependent ‘passengers’ in a modernity, which we have falsely presumed to know and direct.

Official Website: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09528822.2011.573309
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: Rome, Walter Benjamin, Eyjafjallajökull, ash cloud, Modane, Grand Tour, Antonioni, screen memories, L'Eclisse, volcano
Publisher/Broadcaster/Company: Routledge/Taylor & Francis
Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > Central Saint Martins
Date: May 2011
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1080/09528822.2011.573309
Date Deposited: 15 Nov 2016 15:00
Last Modified: 09 Jan 2017 14:28
Item ID: 10589
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/10589

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