Academic literature on the topic 'Basement heritage'

This book is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, the book explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, the author rediscovers what helped Sovi

This chapter analyses the womb imagery permeating Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005), and asks what is so scary about being born. Representations of the cave as womb have a long and distinguished heritage, aligning the cave with the intrauterine qualities of other terrible places: the basements, sewers, underground lairs, mine shafts, and tunnel systems where monsters dwell in horror films. The terrible place of horror can be considered to contain a '“uterine” threat', the threat of dissolution, loss of self, and reincorporation into the mother. Is this threat of reincorporation really enough to account for horror's insistent use of intrauterine imagery? Perhaps the womb represents death for us in ways other than a fear of or desire for non-differentiation: the sole certainty when we are born is that we will die; to be born is to be condemned to a certain death. Thinking about the womb further raises the fundamental, perhaps most uncomfortable metaphysical question: What happened to us before we were born? Where have we come from?