The Collective Memory Reader

Author: Jeffrey K. Olick
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195337417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
In the last few decades, there are few concepts that have rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where it has appeared in speeches at the centers of power and on the front pages of the world's leading newspapers. Seen by scholars in numerous fields as a hallmark characteristic of our age, an idea crucial for understanding our present social, political, and cultural conditions, collective memory now guides inquiries into diverse, though connected, phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of confusion about the meaning, origin, and implication of the term and the field of inquiry it underwrites. The Collective Memory Reader presents, organizes, and evaluates past work and contemporary contributions on collective memory. Combining seminal texts, hard-to-find classics, previously untranslated references, and contemporary landmarks, it will serve as a key reference in the field. In addition to a thorough introduction, which outlines a useful past for contemporary memory studies, The Collective Memory Reader includes five sections-Precursors and Classics; History, Memory, and Identity; Power, Politics, and Contestation; Media and Modes of Transmission; Memory, Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch-comprising ninety-one texts. A short editorial essay introduces each of the sections, while brief capsules frame each of the selected texts. An indispensable guide, The Collective Memory Reader is at once a definitive entry point into the field for students and an essential resource for scholars.

The Collective Memory Reader

Author: Jeffrey K. Olick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199714010
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

The Collective Memory Reader

Author: Jeffrey K. Olick
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195337426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
There are few terms or concepts that have, in the last twenty or so years, rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where it has appeared in speeches atthe centers of power and on the front pages of the world's leading newspapers. The current efflorescence of interest in memory, however, is no mere passing fad: it is a hallmark characteristic of our age and a crucial site for understanding our present social, political, and cultural conditions.Scholars and others in numerous fields have thus employed the concept of collective memory, sociological in origin, to guide their inquiries into diverse, though allegedly connected, phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of confusion about the meaning, origin, and implication of theterm and the field of inquiry it underwrites.The Collective Memory Reader presents, organizes, and evaluates past work and contemporary contributions on the questions raised under the rubric of collective memory. Combining seminal texts, hard-to-find classics, previously untranslated references, and contemporary landmarks, it will serve as anessential resource for teaching and research in the field. In addition, in both its selections as well as in its editorial materials, it suggests a novel life-story for the field, one that appreciates recent innovations but only against the background of a long history.In addition to its major editorial introduction, which outlines a useful past for contemporary memory studies, The Collective Memory Reader includes five sections - Precursors and Classics; History, Memory, and Identity; Power, Politics, and Contestation; Media and Modes of Transmission; Memory,Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch - comprising ninety-one texts. In addition to the essay introducing the entire volume, a brief editorial essay introduces each of the sections, while brief capsules frame each of the 91 texts.

The Politics of Regret

Author: Jeffrey K. Olick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135909814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things – social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war – but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.

Reading Mark's Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory

Author: Sandra Huebenthal
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467458465
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 644

Book Description
How did the Gospel of Mark come to exist? And how was the memory of Jesus shaped by the experiences of the earliest Christians? For centuries, biblical scholars examined texts as history, literature, theology, or even as story. Curiously absent, however, has been attention to processes of collective memory in the creation of biblical texts. Drawing on modern explorations of social memory, Sandra Huebenthal presents a model for reading biblical texts as collective memories. She demonstrates that the Gospel of Mark is a text evolving from collective narrative memory based on recollections of Jesus’s life and teachings. Huebenthal investigates the principles and structures of how groups remember and how their memory is structured and presented. In the case of Mark’s Gospel, this includes examining which image of Jesus, as well as which authorial self-image, this text as memory constructs. Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory serves less as a key to unlock questions about the historical Jesus and more as an examination of memory about him within a particular community, providing a new and important framework for interpreting the earliest canonical gospel in context.

On Collective Memory

Author: Maurice Halbwachs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226115962
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? This volume, the first comprehensive English language translation of Maurice Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge.

Collective Memory Work

Author: Corey W. Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315298694
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
The seemingly mundane events of daily life create a complex knowledge base of lived experience to be explored. But how does one research common experiences and account for context, culture, and identity? A dilemma arises because experience is not just embedded in events, but also in the socially constructed meanings associated with those events. This book details the philosophical underpinnings, design features and implementation strategies of Collective Memory Work – a methodology frequently employed by social justice activists/scholars. Collective Memory Work can provide scholars with unique and nuanced ways to solve problems for and with their participants. Most importantly, the chapters also detail projects and social justice in action, analysing their participants’ real stories and experiences: projects that focus on LGBTQ youth, #blacklivesmatter activists, white faculty working at historically Black colleges and universities, men’s media consumption and much more. Written in an engaging and accessible style, readers will come to understand the potential of their own qualitative research using Collective Memory Work.

The City of Collective Memory

Author: M. Christine Boyer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262522113
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Book Description
Describes the visual and mental models by which urban environment has been recognized, depicted and planned. This analysis draws from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature and painting to identify these maps of the city - as a work of art, as panorama and as spectacle.

Collective Memory and the Historical Past

Author: Jeffrey Andrew Barash
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675846X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
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.

Memory

Author: Susannah Radstone
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082323259X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 574

Book Description
These essays survey the histories, the theories and the fault lines that compose the field of memory research. Drawing on the advances in the sciences and in the humanities, they address the question of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory.