Download or read book Memory History Forgetting written by Paul Ricoeur and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Download or read book History and Memory written by Geoffrey Cubitt and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, "memory" has become a central and controversial concept in historical studies. It is a term that denotes a new and distinctive field of study and a fresh way of conceptualizing history as a more general field of inquiry. This book provides historians with an accessible and stimulating introduction to debates and theories about memory and approaches to the study of it in history and other disciplines. The book explores the relationships between the individual and the collective, between memory as survival and memory as reconstruction, between remembering as a subjective experience and as a social or cultural practice, and between memory and history as modes of retrospective knowledge.

Download or read book Memory written by Alison Winter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-01-16 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picture your 21st birthday. Did you have a party? If so, do you remember who was there? How clear are these memories? Should we trust them? Such questions have fascinated scientists for hundreds of years, and, as Alison Winter shows in this book, the answers have changed dramatically in just the past century.

Download or read book Memory and History written by Jaclyn Jeffrey and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the interfaces of memory theory and oral history, which is based on human recollection. Essays examine the importance of memory and its reliability. Scholars from two fields, cognitive psychology and oral history, examine the ways in which human experience is recalled and interpreted. The papers were first presented in 1988 at an interdisciplinary conference sponsored by Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Contents: Foreword, Donald A. Ritchie; Introduction; Believe It or Not: Rethinking the Historical Interpretation of Memory, Paul Thompson, Comment by Glenace E. Edwall; Tricked by Memory, Elizabeth F. Loftus, Comment by Eva M. McMahan; American History and the Structures of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography, Michael H. Frisch, Comment by Kenneth Foote; Dialogue I: Sally Browder, Michael H. Frisch, ELizabeth Loftus, Paul Thompson; Phoenix and Chimera: The Changing Faces of Memory, Marigold Linton, Comment by Kim Lacy Rogers; What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly, Karen E. Fields, Comment by Alpine W. Jefferson; Reliability and Validity in Oral History: The Case for Memory, Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Comment by Terry Anderson, Comment by Brent Slife; Dialogue II: Karen E. Feilds, Alice M. Hoffman, Howard S. Hoffman, Marigold Linton, Paul Thompson, Donald Ritchie; Afterword, Lewis M. Barker. Co-published with the Institute for Oral History.

Download or read book History and Memory in African American Culture written by Genevieve Fabre and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-08 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Vèvè Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Geneviève Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.

Download or read book Collective Memory and the Historical Past written by Jeffrey Andrew Barash and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Memory Trauma and History written by Michael S. Roth and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Memory, trauma, and history is comprosed of essays that fall into five overlapping subject areas: history and memory; psychoanalysis and trauma; postmodernism, scholarship, and cultural politics; photography and representation; and liberal education." -- Introduction.

Download or read book The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing written by Patrick H. Hutton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author provides a comprehensive overview of the intense and sustained work on the relationship between collective memory and history, retracing the royal roads pioneering scholars have traveled in their research and writing on this topic: notably, the politics of commemoration (purposes and practices of public remembrance); the changing uses of memory worked by new technologies of communication (from the threshold of literacy to the digital age); the immobilizing effects of trauma upon memory (with particular attention to the remembered legacy of the Holocaust). He follows with an analysis of the implications of this scholarship for our thinking about history itself, with attention to such issues as the mnemonics of historical time, and the encounter between representation and experience in historical understanding. His book provides insight into the way interest in the concept of memory - as opposed to long-standing alternatives, such as myth, tradition, and heritage - has opened new vistas for scholarship not only in cultural history but also in shared ventures in memory studies in related fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Download or read book Social Memory and History written by Jacob J. Climo and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2002-10-23 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Social Memory and History, a group of anthropologists, sociologists, social linguists, gerontologists, and historians explore the ways in which memory reconstructs the past and constructs the present. A substantial introduction by the editors outlines the key issues in the understanding of social memory: its nature and process, its personal and political implications, the crisis in memory, and the relationship between social and individual memory. Ten cross-cultural case studies—groups ranging from Kiowa songsters, Burgundian farmers, elderly Phildelaphia whites, Chilean political activists, American immigrants to Israel, and Irish working class women—then explore how social memory transmits culture or contests it at the individual, community, and national levels in both tangible and symbolic spheres.

Download or read book Memory and American History written by David Paul Thelen and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Memory and American History contains some of the most interesting explorations and significant recent results of work by scholars using traditional primary and secondary sources as well as oral history interviews."" -- Library Quarterly From true memory comes true history. Or does it? As this book demonstrates, the study of memory opens exciting opportunities for historians to ask fresh questions of conventional sources and to make new connections among subjects that have come to be regarded as specialized and distinct.

Download or read book History as an Art of Memory written by Patrick H. Hutton and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1993 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hutton considers the ideas of philosophers, poets, and historians to seek outthe roots of fact as mere recollection.

Download or read book History Memory Performance written by D. Dean and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History, Memory, Performance is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring performances of the past in a wide range of trans-national and historical contexts. At its core are contributions from theatre scholars and public historians discussing how historical meaning is shaped through performance.

Download or read book History and Memory after Auschwitz written by Dominick LaCapra and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relations between memory and history have recently become a subject of contention, and the implications of that debate are particularly troubling for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. Dominick LaCapra focuses on the interactions among history, memory, and ethicopolitical concerns as they emerge in the aftermath of the Shoah. Particularly notable are his analyses of Albert Camus's novella The Fall, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, and Art Spiegelman's "comic book" Maus. LaCapra also considers the Historians' Debate in the aftermath of German reunification and the role of psychoanalysis in historical understanding and critical theory. In six essays, LaCapra addresses a series of related questions. Are there experiences whose traumatic nature blocks understanding and disrupts memory while producing belated effects that have an impact on attempts to address the past? Do some events present moral and representational issues even for groups or individuals not directly involved in them? Do those more directly involved have special responsibilities to the past and the way it is remembered in the present? Can or should historiography define itself in a purely scholarly and professional way that distances it from public memory and its ethical implications? Does art itself have a special responsibility with respect to traumatic events that remain invested with value and emotion?

Download or read book In Praise of Forgetting written by David Rieff and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, "inoculate" the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times--the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11--Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.

Download or read book Memory Crash written by Georgiy Kasianov and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of historical politics in Ukraine, framed in a broader European context, shows how social, political, and cultural groups have used and misused the past from the final years of the Soviet Union to 2020. Georgiy Kasianov details practices relating to history and memory by a variety of actors, including state institutions, non-governmental organizations, political parties, historians, and local governments. He identifies the main political purposes of these practices in the construction of nation and identity, struggles for power, warfare, and international relations. Kasianov considers the Ukrainian case in the context of a global increase in the politics of history and memory, with particular emphasis on a distinctive East-European variety. He pays special attention to the use and abuse of history in relations between Ukraine, Russia, and Poland.

Download or read book Exhibiting the Past written by Kirk A. Denton and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.

Download or read book Remembering War written by J. M. Winter and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the “memory boom” is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says. The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers “theaters of memory”—film, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.