Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Häftad, Engelska, 2020

300 kr

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Beskrivning

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2020-11-29
Mått:152 x 229 x 23 mm
Vikt:367 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:280
Förlag:The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:9780226758466

Utforska kategorier

Historia: teori och metod inom Historia och arkeologi

Mer om författaren

Jeffrey Andrew Barash is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Amiens in France. He is the author or editor of many books, including Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning and The Social Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Recensioner i media

"His study is admirable for the way he relates the story of philosophers’ thinking about memory to today's crisis about its relationship to history. There are several informative studies that explain the workings of digital‐age memory. But Barash's study is distinctive for his insight into the politics of its technologies from a humanist perspective. His review of the historical role of collective memory as living memory is welcome at a time in which such memory, so widely referenced in academic discourse, is in fact contracting in the face of technologies of communication that are remodeling contemporary culture. His analysis might be read as an apostrophe to our society at large concerning the way publicity‐driven values of media are fast crowding out the living memory that serves as collective memory's core."

Innehållsförteckning

IntroductionThe Sources of MemoryPart 1 Symbolic Embodiment, Imagination, and the “Place” of Collective Memory1 Is Collective Memory a Figment of the Imagination? The Scope of Memory in the Public Sphere2 Analyzing Collective Memory 3 Thresholds of Personal Identity and Public Experience Excursus Critical Reflections: The Contemporary Theories of Ricœur, Edelman, and NoraPart 2 Time, Collective Memory, and the Historical Past4 Temporal Articulations 5 Virtual Experience, the Mass Media, and the Configuration of the Public Sphere 6 The Contextualized Past: Collective Memory and Historical Understanding Conclusion The Province of Collective Memory and Its Theoretical Promise NotesBibliography Index