How Modernity Forgets

Paul Connerton is a Research Associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Fellow in the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London.

'How Societies Remember was a tightly argued account of the importance of habitual, bodily memory to cultural transmission; How Modernity Forgets is a substantive cultural diagnosis of modernity, centred on the theme of cultural amnesia … It … [says] what it says with the sort of clarity that puts most cultural analysis to shame. Modernity … has displaced social life from place and replaced the known with the merely known about. In a series of superb historical vignettes Connerton shows that this has occurred in three ways: through the dismantling of the city frontier in the nineteenth century and the growth of megacities in the twentieth, through the development of superhuman speed … and through 'the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment' … via suburbanization, deindustrialization and urban renewal.' The British Journal of Sociology

• 1. Introduction; 2. Two types of place memory; 3. Temporalities of forgetting; 4. Topographies of forgetting; 5. Conclusion.