The Betweenness of Monuments
The Betweenness of Monuments
Environments are not merely “natural”; built environments where we live, work, and bring up children are equally environments. Through a reflection on monuments, this essay shows that understanding what we are doing in our built environments is a necessary pre-condition for conceiving how built environments overlap and conflict with natural environments. Building on the work of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, the author demonstrates that monuments are elements of the built environment that are not to be revered and unassailably preserved, but that are living elements of our temporality, historicity, and broader environment. A hermeneutic approach repositions monuments showing that while they do transmit a tradition, they exist in the tension between the presence of the past and the presence of the future, between memory and history, testimony and archive, between one and another, and between nature and built environment.
Keywords: Archive, Monuments, Memory, Eternality, Historicality, Narrative, Ricoeur, Paul, Heidegger, Martin, Philosophical hermeneutics, Built environments
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
