1st Edition
The Building of a Modern Antiquity Hymns and Laments for Athens
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, and visual sociology.
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
Biography
Georgia Giannakopoulou is Associate Lecturer in Sociology at The American College of Greece and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is the co-editor of The Detective of Modernity: Essays on the Work of David Frisby.