Miles Orvell

Temple University, Academic English, Faculty Member

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My research has been on American culture, primarily, emphasizing the relationship between cultural forms, symbolic representation (literature, photography, design) and political formation. I have a special interest in the imagination of space.
Address: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

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Papers by Miles Orvell

Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture

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The Sarcophagus and the City: Reflections on Chernobyl and the Dystopian Imagination

Interfaces, Jun 30, 2023

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Et in Arcadia Ego

<i>Faux Real: Genuine Leather and 200 Years of Inspired Fakes</i> (review)

Technology and Culture, 2008

The New Face of American Anger: Internet Imagery and the Power of Contagious Feeling

De Gruyter eBooks, Jun 15, 2011

Empire of Ruins

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 21, 2021

Empire of Ruins explores the meaning of ruins in American culture, from the mid-nineteenth centur... more Empire of Ruins explores the meaning of ruins in American culture, from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, arguing that photographs have been the chief means by which the significance of ruins has been created in American culture. The book traces a historical argument that begins in the nineteenth century, when Americans yearned for the ruins of Europe, then moves to the discovery of Native American ruins in the Southwest. Later chapters explore the visualization of inner city ruins, abandoned factories, and shopping malls, and the “creative destruction” of buildings in order to make way for bigger ones. In addition, it analyzes the imagery of the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster; the ruins of the industrial landscape through mining operations; the ruins created by natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy; and the ruins produced by climate change, including the melting of the ice caps. Empire of Ruins considers, in conclusion, the way the picturing of ruins has served to mark revolutionary moments in political culture, symbolizing the choices societies must make. Empire of Ruins focuses mainly on photography, but it encompasses painting, literature, and popular films as well, in order to provide a larger picture of the cultural meaning of ruins. At the same time, it examines the powerful aesthetic attraction of ruin imagery in photographs and films, showing how the Destructive Sublime, a new category of experience, evokes contrary responses in viewers.

Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon

American Literary History, 1992

... Cantor draws explicitly on George Hemman&#x27;s long-run-ning comic strip, Krazy Kat (191... more

Frank's America. Clement's Copenhagen Permission to Stare

Fund og forskning i Det Kongelige Biblioteks samlinger, 1990

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Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, Historical Studies: Connecting the Dots

American Studies, Jun 1, 2006

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Hales: Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915

Studies in Visual Communication, 1984

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Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life

The Journal of American History, Dec 1, 1995

After 9/11: Photography, the Destructive Sublime, and the Postmodern Archive

Michigan Quarterly Review, Apr 1, 2006

Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Sep 1, 1984

The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940

The American Historical Review, Apr 1, 1991

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Order and Rebellion: Faulkner’s Small Town and the Place of Memory

University Press of Mississippi eBooks, Oct 1, 2012

Review: Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment by Mary N. Woods

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Sep 1, 2011

Mary N. Woods . Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment . ... more Mary N. Woods . Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, xxxiii + 317 pages, 21 color and 140 b/w illus. ISBN 9780812241082 We know architecture first-hand, as a three-dimensional experience; we know it also, as Mary N. Woods observes in Beyond the Architect's Eye, through photography. Photographs have often captured the essence of buildings in ways that transcend our first-hand experiences, transforming them into indelible memories. Indeed, much twentieth-century modern architecture is known to us through the iconic images of photographers such as Ezra Stoller, Bill Hedrick, and Julius Shulman, who worked with and for architects. Woods, professor of the history of architecture and urbanism at Cornell, challenges the canonization of this kind of architectural photography, especially in so far as it often erases human presence and gives us instead an abstract aesthetic of line, plane, curve, and volume—"eye candy or soft pornography," she calls it (xxii). In doing so, she invokes one of the great photographers of the 1930s, Berenice Abbott, who demonstrated in her own work the medium's power to depict, as Abbott put it, "the intersection of human beings and solid architectural construction all impinging upon each other in the same time" (xxii). Woods is also writing, to some degree, in the spirit of the Architectural Review 's famous (or infamous) "Manplan" series (1969–70), which sought to shift architectural photography's focus from depicting buildings as heroic objects to picturing the life around them, including the myriad social problems (education, urban protest, work, etc.) that are embedded in spatial structures. Hostile responses from the journal's readers, architects mainly, made this a short-lived experiment.1 Woods's …

Weegee's Voyeurism and the Mastery of Urban Disorder

American Art, 1992

Miles Orvell On the back of each photograph, he would stamp" CREDIT PHOTO BY WEEGEE THE FAMO... more

Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation: "American Dream" & "Roger and Me

Film Quarterly, Dec 1, 1994

Nonfiction films rarely reach beyond a small, devoted congregation, but in recent years two works... more Nonfiction films rarely reach beyond a small, devoted congregation, but in recent years two works in particular have realized a mass audienceBarbara Kopple's Academy Award-winning American Dream (1991) and Michael Moore's widely celebrated and controversial film, Roger and Me (1989). That they have gained this wide audience speaks first of all to the fact that both films deal with the fate of the worker at the hands of the modern corporation, a subject that has been the focus of public concern for more than a decade, inflected most recently by the predicaments of postindustrialism: Given the new order of global capitalism, what power can labor unions claim against management? and what responsibility has management toward workers and their communities? Yet despite these similarities in subject matter-both films also happen to deal with plant closings in the beleaguered Midwest-the two could hardly be more different, stylistically and rhetorically. Kopple works within the relatively traditional documentary forms that Bill Nichols calls expository and observational; American Dream conforms to our customary documentary expectations as viewers that we are comfortably in the hands of an all-seeing, allsympathizing film-maker, expectations that have been part of the documentary mode since its inception Miles Orvell

Rethinking the American City

University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2014

As the predominant life-world for modern dwellers, the city has been a powerful motor of social a... more As the predominant life-world for modern dwellers, the city has been a powerful motor of social and cultural scholarship for more than a century. Persistent as a general phenomenon yet highly malleable to spatiotemporal circumstance, the city is one of those critical topics that demand constant rethinking. Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch have now undertaken this task, and they have undertaken it with great rigor and pertinence. Their volume on the American city opens a new series on Architecture, Technology and Culture with the University of Pennsylvania Press that explores "the theory, history and politics of cultural and spatial transformations from the 19th century to contemporary digital culture" (http:// www.upenn.edu/pennpress/series.html#ATC). With its focus on that spatial formation-the city-in which architecture, technology and culture most prominently intersect, the volume's stakes are decidedly programmatic. Assuming that "cities have become both the nemesis and laboratory of human life in the new millennium" (xi) the editors understand their project as "an effort to conduct a 'conceptual inventory' (…); (…) 'an examination of some of the leading concepts and tools that govern our thinking about space, with an eye to their genealogy and their usefulness for the future'" (xiv). To this end, they have come up with a list of tools and concepts: energy, sustainability, the multicultural city, ruins, aesthetic space, designing the city, mobility, the digital city and the future city. If programmatic choices can, by their very nature, never be exhaustive the selection made here is highly compelling for the task at hand. Conjoining matters of planning with matters of feeling and using urban space, the volume echoes Henri Lefebvre's influential idea that space is not a stable backdrop to the dynamic operations of time (and in that sense not simply given) but equally dynamic as time; that it is indeed relentlessly produced

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Creative Destruction and Urban Space

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 21, 2021

This chapter focuses on the deliberate destruction of the city (“creative destruction”), clearing... more This chapter focuses on the deliberate destruction of the city (“creative destruction”), clearing out older buildings to make way for newer, more profitable ones. Penn Station’s demolition is the most notorious example, and the chapter examines the way photographers represented its demise and how it ignited a new preservation movement. Life magazine carried the story of urban renewal through the post–World War II period, including its coverage of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, which came to symbolize the failures of government-subsidized housing. While creative destruction was considered a necessary cornerstone of capitalism, artists were critiquing the process in works of parody (Robert Smithson) and in the dramatic dismantling of buildings (Gordon Matta-Clark). The whole question of the “life cycle” of buildings and cities is considered, focusing on the work of Alan Berger in his theory of “drosscape” and in Rem Koolhaas’s notion of buildings with a fixed life.