Reclaiming Modernity

Essays on a Paradoxical Nostalgia

By: Larry Bennett

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eBook | 25 February 2025

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Why do we seek to return to the past or rescue pieces of the past that may have value in the present? Why does nostalgia attach to an approach to the world, social rules, and material products that willfully rejected the past?

Larry Bennett explores the complexities of nostalgia with considerations of the historic preservation of brutalist architecture, specifically Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago; the memoirs and recollections of early and mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn and Detroit; and the turntable's rebirth as a musical instrument alongside the vinyl LP's resurgence as a prized way of consuming music. Bennett tracks modernity as expressed through ideas, artistic products, and widespread social practices. His consideration of nostalgia focuses on our inclination to rediscover value in people, places, and social habits diminished by the passage of time.

Provocative and multidisciplinary, Reclaiming Modernity delves into the paradox of how we feel nostalgia for ideas and times that emerged from an impulse to shun nostalgia.