Collective Memory and the Historical Past - Brossura

Barash, Jeffrey Andrew

Brossura

ISBN 10: 022675846X ISBN 13: 9780226758466

Casa editrice: University of Chicago Press, 2020

Riassunto

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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Informazioni sull?autore

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.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2020
• ISBN 10: 022675846X
• ISBN 13: 9780226758466
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 278
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile