A Topography of Memory

A Topography of Memory
Author: Isabelle Engelhardt
Publisher: P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Editions Scientifiques Internationales
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2002
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

This book is an analysis of the history of various sorts of representation, chiefly memorials, on the site of the concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald in comparison with Auschwitz, Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. By providing a reconstruction of the history and debates surrounding the question of memorializing and forgetting, it interrogates the question of how to represent the unrepresentable. It draws on Freudian analysis, the literature on sites of memory, and the debate about writing about the Holocaust, showing clearly how the camps have been and still remain highly contested places of memory and arguing that these debates and their physical embodiment on the sites have to be incorporated in our understanding of what these places represent. --from publisher description.

The Topography of Remembrance

The Topography of Remembrance
Author: Gerdien Jonker
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2018-08-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004378901

The Topography of Remembrance deals with different forms of remembrance and collective memory in Mesopotamia, discussing both its public (national) and private (family) aspects. The Introduction offers a history of modern, European memory in comparison with the Mesopotamian mode. The research adds to the recent discussion on collective memory. The Mesopotamians found tools for the construction and passing on of common remembrance in liturgical repetition, in the preservation of buildings and monuments, and in communication channels. To describe these processes the author deals with different texts written between 2300-300 BC, which transport memory from a historical, administrational or religious perspective. According to this study, the need to remember was prompted by the search for identity, a dynamic process in which forgetting played an essential part. The description of this process is also relevant to modern society. It offers an important contribution to the discussion of acculturation and identity.

How Modernity Forgets

How Modernity Forgets
Author: Paul Connerton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2009-07-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1139480197

Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they are unmemorable; consumerism has become disconnected from the labour process; urban architecture has a short life-span; and social relationships are less clearly defined - all of which has eroded the foundations on which we build and share our memories. Providing a profound insight into the effects of modern society, this book is a must-read for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and philosophers, as well as anyone interested in social theory and the contemporary western world.

Time Maps

Time Maps
Author: Eviatar Zerubavel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2012-06-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226924904

The pioneering sociologist and author of The Seven Day Circle continues his analysis of time with this fascinating look at history as social construct. Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps, we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past and the social grammar of conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history…brilliant and elegant."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz

Topographies of Memories

Topographies of Memories
Author: Anita Bakshi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2017-11-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319634623

This book explores new approaches towards developing memorial and heritage sites, moving beyond the critique of existing practices that have been the traditional focus of studies of commemoration. Offering understandings of the effects of conflict on memories of place, as manifested in everyday lives and official histories, it explores the formation of urban identities and constructed images of the city. Topographies of Memories suggests interdisciplinary approaches for creating commemorative sites with shared stakes. The first part of the book focuses on memory dynamics, the second on Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and the third on physical and material world interventions. Design practices and modes of engagement with places of memory are explored, making connections between theoretical explorations of memory and forgetting and practical strategies for designers and practitioners.

W. G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald
Author: Scott Denham
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2008-08-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110201941

The novelist, poet, and essayist W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001) was perhaps the most original German writer of the last decade of the 20th century (“Die Ausgewanderten”, “Austerlitz”, “Luftkrieg und Literatur”). His writing is marked by a unique ‘hybridity’ that combines characteristics of travelogue, cultural criticism, crime story, historical essay, and dream diary, among other genres. He employs layers of literary and motion picture allusions that contribute to a sometimes enigmatic, sometimes intimately familiar mood; his dominant mode is melancholy. The contributions of this anthology examine W. G. Sebald as narrator and pensive observer of history. The book includes a previously unpublished interview with Sebald from 1998.

Politics of Memory

Politics of Memory
Author: Marco Scotini
Publisher:
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-05-17
Genre: Art, Modern
ISBN: 9783943620337

The anthology Politics of Memory investigates the changing relationship between artistic practices and the documentary. The documentoffered as an objective trace left by events, as material proof or as the creation of realitycan transform a state of memory into state memory through historical removal which, ultimately challenges permanent or temporary forgetting, casting memory into the future. Bringing together the work of international artists and filmmakers including Hito Steyerl, Eric Baudelaire and Clemens von Wedemeyer and others who attended the cycle of conferences held between 2009 and 2013 at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano, this illustrated softcover publication is the result of a multi-year research project promoted by NABAs Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies program. It begins with the idea of memory as a critical exercise and act of resistance and compares a variety of artistic expressions investigating forms of documentary making and archiving.

Girl at War

Girl at War
Author: Sara Novic
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-03-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0812986393

For readers of The Tiger’s Wife and All the Light We Cannot See comes a powerful debut novel about a girl’s coming of age—and how her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is profoundly shaped by war. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE, BOOKLIST, AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE • ALEX AWARD WINNER • LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION Zagreb, 1991. Ana Jurić is a carefree ten-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia’s capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana’s idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana’s sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world. New York, 2001. Ana is now a college student in Manhattan. Though she’s tried to move on from her past, she can’t escape her memories of war—secrets she keeps even from those closest to her. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, Ana returns to Croatia after a decade away, hoping to make peace with the place she once called home. As she faces her ghosts, she must come to terms with her country’s difficult history and the events that interrupted her childhood years before. Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest, generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history shapes the individual. Sara Nović fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl—and its legacy on all of us. It’s a debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story that continues to resonate today. Praise for Girl at War “Outstanding . . . Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice) “[An] old-fashioned page-turner that will demand all of the reader’s attention, happily given. A debut novel that astonishes.”—Vanity Fair “Shattering . . . The book begins with what deserves to become one of contemporary literature’s more memorable opening lines. The sentences that follow are equally as lyrical as a folk lament and as taut as metal wire wrapped through an electrified fence.”—USA Today

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance
Author: Daniel Spoerri
Publisher: Atlas Press LLC
Total Pages: 254
Release: 1995
Genre: Art
ISBN:

This book is about the collaborative work by four artists associated with the FLUXUS and Nouveau Réalisme movements.

On Collective Memory

On Collective Memory
Author: Maurice Halbwachs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1992-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780226115962

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.