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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Barash, Jeffrey Andrew

Paperback

PhilosophyHistoriography

ISBN10: 022675846X
ISBN13: 9780226758466
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Nov 29 2020
Pages: 280
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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