Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction

✍ Scribed by Nicolas Pethes

• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 135
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume provides an overview of theories of cultural memory that are intensively discussed in cultural studies and humanities disciplines such as history, sociology, literary studies, art history, and media studies. Cultural memory encompasses all rituals, institutions and practices through which communities establish their identity and common, which are challenged by the digital turn today. The book presents, on the one hand, basic arguments by the most important memory theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries and, on the other, exemplary descriptions of the most significant forms of cultural memory.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction: What, How, and Why Do Cultures Remember?
Part I: The History and Topics of Cultural Memory Studies
1. Nature or Technique? From Ancient Philosophy to Modern Psychology
2. Past or Present? The Cultural Function of Recollection in the Works of Nietzsche
3. Politics or Art? Origin and Tradition in the Works of Freud und Warburg
4. Individual or Social Remembering? Collective Memory According to Halbwachs
5. Commuincative or Cultural Memory? Tradition and Identity According to Assmann
6. Remembering or Forgetting? Culture as the Memory of Society in Systems Theory
Part II: Techniques and Functions of Cultural Memory
1. Rituals: Holidays and Sites of Memory
2. Rhetoric: Orality and Literacy
3. Media: Methods of Storage and Metaphors of Memory
4. Tradition: Canon, Censorship, and the Victims of History
5. Aesthetics: Cultures of Memory in Music, Art, and Literature
Conclusion: Narrating the Past between Documentation and Fiction
Bibliography