Screen Memory - Department of English

that is expressed by it were both born on the grave of
the state as the center of all creative politics
(Winter 74 and Ankersmit 171).
As Walter Benjamin wrote, the task of remembrance is “to save
what has miscarried” (Jay 22).
Group identity is worked out against the dominant discourse.
At every moment, countless revisionist versions of countless
official narratives are circulating in rich ambient play.
National memory may be deemed false not only because it is shaped
by national desires and the laws of narrative but also because it
is rhetorically totalizing, intent on absorbing the entire past.
Another effect of narrative is to make the past feel told, fully
understood, what Claude Lanzmann calls an “absolute obscenity in
the project of understanding” (Roth 1995b:209).
Utterances and images that articulate the memories of
relatively powerless groups, usually written in resistance to
dominant narratives, are commonly referred to as counter-
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memories. National memory and counter-memory meet and struggle
at various sites of contention:
In the United States, monuments such as the Vietnam War
Memorial, special displays such as the Enola Gay
exhibit, commemorative occasions such as the
Christopher Columbus quintecentennial (?), the decision
to honor Martin Luther King Jr. through a public
holiday, and attempts to create theme parks out of
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