Screen Memory - Department of English

More documents

Recommendations

Info

preserve the memory of the heroes and deities of antiquity. In the form of art, these symbols of civilization preserve “intense basic experiences” of primitive life (Gombrich 243). It is likely that the purely secular notion of collective memory entered Western thought as a metaphoric deposit of racial memory. The major players in this twentieth-century development were the sociologist Halbwachs, the art historian Warburg, and, later, the historian Nora. The emergence of such a concept may very well have been an inevitable consequence of the development of the social sciences, anthropology, sociology, and history. Halbwachs began as a student of Bergson but later switched his intellectual allegiance to Emile Durkheim. In 1922 he wrote Collective Memory, the pioneer study of the workings of group memory; a second book on the subject, The Social Frameworks of Memory, was published in 1925. For Halbwachs, memory was not an attribute that belongs to one in the way that vision does. Individual memory was a secondary, phantasmic, effect: a “man who remembers alone what others do not remember,” Halbwachs wrote, “resembles somebody who sees what others do not see. It is as if he suffers from hallucinations” (Boyer 26). The individual was nothing but the “crossroads of collective memories” (Tai 2001a:52). Many writers agree that collective memory is metaphor not memory because the collective lacks such an agency; so, for 5
example, Yosef Yerushalmi--“Just as ‘the life of a people’ is a biological metaphor, so too ‘the memory of a people’ is a psychological metaphor”; Susan Sontag--“not remembering but stipulating that this is important”; and Amos Funkenstein-- Consciousness and memory can only be realized by an individual who acts, is aware, and remembers. Just as a nation cannot eat or dance, neither can it speak or remember . . . . The employment of “collective memory” can be justified only on a metaphorical level–-and this is how historians of old have always employed it–-as a general code name for something that is supposedly behind myths, traditions, customs, cults, all of which represent the “spirit,” the “psyche,” of a society, a tribe, a nation (Boyarin 23, Sontag 2003:86 and Gedi 34-35). Collective memory can also be thought of as a combination or consolidation of individual memories, a category of abstraction. Robert Bevan considers it to be “a bundle of individual memories that coalesce by means of exchanges between people and develop into a communal narrative” (15). For others, collective memory is not simply a metaphoric analogue. Qualitative differences have been proposed between the two memories: collective memory is more intersubjective and dialogical than personal memory, more “act than object, and more 6
Page 1 and 2: Screen Memory At just the moment Pr
Page 3 and 4: they also tell a relatively insigni
Page 5 and 6: No one calls in question the fact t
Page 7 and 8: on her head and a children's nurse.
Page 9 and 10: I have at my disposal a fair number
Page 11 and 12: phantasy of this kind tends to slip
Page 13 and 14: was closely related to other psycho
Page 15 and 16: (Bogaç 73). 8 There is another sys
Page 17 and 18: Freud and Josef Breuer worked with
Page 19 and 20: A deeply mystical version of memory
Page 21: in every part of the body, even in
Page 25 and 26: exchange; or, at the other extreme,
Page 27 and 28: private; it is “constructed along
Page 29 and 30: traumatic events that can be neithe
Page 31 and 32: 37). Libraries and museums are the
Page 33 and 34: American conservatives fashioned a
Page 35 and 36: Freedom of Information Act, the Fed
Page 37 and 38: comforting illusion was shattered b
Page 39 and 40: Collective amnesia Amnesia was also
Page 41 and 42: family portrait galleries” and
Page 43 and 44: egime change is familiar television
Page 45 and 46: material of history. Whether mental
Page 47 and 48: past” (Davis 1989:2). According t
Page 49 and 50: econfigures) the past into a form t
Page 51 and 52: 2003:211). Nora states that “Memo
Page 53 and 54: LaCapra history is a corrective to
Page 55 and 56: that is expressed by it were both b
Page 57 and 58: South Africa, the writer Njabulo Nd
Page 59 and 60: therefore by its very nature could
Page 61 and 62: Philosophy of History," he wrote th
Page 63 and 64: where “an extreme threshold or ou
Page 65 and 66: with community, as Halbwachs propos
Page 67 and 68: ut its literature contained extensi

Screen Memory - Department of English

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?