I offer an analysis of the role of aesthetic value in the formation of cultural memory. More specifically, I examine how cultural memory is formed through cultural artifacts that embody a connection to the past via aesthetic means. My approach is motivated by artifacts from small-scale preindustrial societies, which make it apparent that aesthetic values, rather than being pursued for their own sake alone, enhance other functions, such as maintaining cultural identity and bringing the (...) past into the present. I focus on rock art painting from the Kimberley, Australia, and effigies animated during rituals in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea to argue that, to play a significant role in the formation of cultural memory, aesthetic value must be aligned with implicit conceptions of time which inform the production of artifacts mediating cultural memory. This argument has implications for understanding differences in apprehending memory values and aesthetic values across cultural domains. (shrink)

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing examines the ways in which memory furnishes important source material in the three distinct areas of critical theory, memoir, and memorial art. The book first shows how affect theorists have increasingly complemented more traditional archival research through the use of "academic memoir." This theoretical piece is then applied to memoir works by Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau, and the final case study in the book interprets as memorial art Kara (...) Walker's ephemeral 80,000 pound sugar sculpture of 2014. Memory as method; memory as archive; memorial as affect: this book looks at the interplay between archival sources on the one hand, and the affective memories, both personal and collective, that flow from, around, and into the constantly shifting record of the past. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the overlaps between the ‘cultural memory’ of the distant past and the memory of the Great War in Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1939, looking in particular at the use of medieval images in war memorials. There was a certain tension between advocates of medievalism and supporters of classicist images, but often, they reached a compromise. The chapter combines a discussion of the concept of ‘cultural memory’ with case studies on (...) the reception of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the era of the Great War. (shrink)

Jan Assman traces the roots of Mosaic Religion back to its Aegyptian origin. Reading the Holy Bible often makes one think that Moses was Hebrew. But Moses was an adopted Agyptian, as we become aware. Cultural memory is certainly stored in books, but at the same time it is a memory that forms our perception as human beings.

Utopias are embedded in contexts from which they derive meaning and significance. As a vehicle for speculation, intervention, and creativity, narrative utopia reflects the circumstances of its times, including its culture's relationship to the past. This article offers a survey of ways in which utopias engage with the problematics of historical memory both by looking to the past in the “real” world or in a mythical world and by positing fictional peoples with their own historical memory/ies, as instanced (...) in legends, libraries, works of art, and so on. The erasure or falsification of memory, on the other hand, appears as an important leitmotif of the dystopian imagination. By pointing out a variety of examples and issues, the article will attempt to bridge the existing gap between utopian studies and cultural memory studies. (shrink)

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is surrounded by illuminating misconceptions—myths that cannot be blithely dismissed because they actually provide some insight into the significance of the study. One of those is that the men were deliberately infected with syphilis; another is that they obtained no treatment for the disease. Some other errors are alleged in two recent articles about the study, but these articles themselves create their own fictions.

Referring to a past that never was, dij vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of dij vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichid celebrations of cultural memory (...) and forces us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time. Disturbances of cultural memory-screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions-disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, dij vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp's analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner M]ller, this exploration of the effects of dij vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol's work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet. Peter Krapp, lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, coedited "Medium Cool," a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on contemporary media theory. He has published in the fields of German studies, media studies, and literary theoryand, since 1995, has acted as editor of the Hydra Web site for theories of literature and media. (shrink)

Memory has long been a subject of fascination for poets, artists, philosophers and historians. The volume examines how past events are remembered, contested, forgotten, learned from and shared with others. Each author in The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies has been asked to reflect on his or her research companions as a scholar, who studies memory. The original studies presented in the volume are written by leading experts, who emphasize both the continuity of (...) heritage and tradition, as well as the memory of hostilities, traumas and painful events. Comprised of four thematic sections, The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research within the discipline. The principal themes include: ¢ Memory, History and Time ¢ Social, Psychological and Cultural Frameworks of Memory ¢ Acts and Places of Memory ¢ Politics of Memory, Forgetting and Democracy. (shrink)

Focusing on A Sketch of Sites and Objects in the Imperial Capital, this article examines how the primary author, Liu Tong, created and preserved the cultural memory of Beijing through writing the city’s scenic sites in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. Liu Tong, who sojourned in the capital then situated on the state’s frontier, observed Beijing during a period of comprehensive decay. This temporal and spatial framework affected the way he observed Beijing’s northern landscape features and (...) inspired him to both preserve the city’s literary and historical heritage and report on its current dilapidation. This study addresses Liu Tong’s literary strategies to preserve Beijing’s literary legacy and surviving landscapes, with particular attention to his adaptation of earlier travel writings about Beijing, his development of a new lyrical style of prose, and the portrayal of the immediate reality of his lived experience. (shrink)

This essay considers Paul Ricœur’s early notion of cultural memory from 1956-1960. He discusses it in two texts: “What does Humanism Mean?” and the slightly later The Symbolism of Evil. In the former, cultural memory appears as an ongoing and dynamic process of retroaction focussed on questioning and rethinking the meaning of classical antiquity for contemporary worlds, on the one hand, that is linked to an important critical aspect as a counterweight to the flattening effects of (...) modernity, on the other. In the latter, cultural memory expands the reach of the classical heritage, and, in addition to retroaction, further modes of orientation, such as relations of depth and breadth, are delineated. At first glance, cultural memory, in Ricœur’s sense, appears to be embodied in the singular, albeit generalized self. Yet, in reconstructing its meaning, the essay argues that Ricœur’s articulation of cultural memory relies on an implicit collective dimension. The present essay’s hermeneutic reconstruction of Ricœur’s notion of cultural memory comprises a preliminary step of a broader project that aims to rearticulate Jan and Aleida Assmann’s cultural memory framework along social imaginary lines. In this vein, the essay concludes with an overview of the Assmannian approach to cultural memory and considers possible bridges between Ricœur and the Assmanns. (shrink)

This paper affords a Lotmanian cultural semiotic analysis of the inner workings of ritual embodying the mechanism of cultural memory. In this intersectional study, we propose treating ritual as an integral semiotic system in which the community follows a prescribed collective process to create religious or social meanings and to regulate the mechanism of cultural memory through concrete symbols in the forms of behavior, speech, gestures, objects, spatial structures, and so on. Three semiotic properties of (...) ritual in relation to cultural memory are identified, namely, continuity, concreteness, and integrity, which are jointly responsible for the efficacy of ritual in cultural memory making, or to be specific, in the preservation, retrieval, and even reproduction of cultural memory. With these properties, ritual helps construct and maintain socio-cultural order and group identity in the community, by repeating itself and thus creating a sense of continuity through the preservation and retrieval of cultural memory. The key components in ritual are its diverse and polysemous symbols, which are seldom confined to a specific context, although they are indeed subject to the dominant symbol and the dominant meaning in a ritual when necessary. With an extraordinary degree of autonomy and not bound to any fixed context, ritual symbols can enter a ritual situation as its components but retain the freedom of leaving the ritual context at any time, like an unchained “spectator,” and permeating multiple contexts as self-contained units. It is precisely through these transferrable ritual symbols that the fragments of cultural memory are randomly dispersed in the semiosphere and carried to unexpected socio-cultural contexts, bridging the past, the present, and the future and creating new cultural memory. (shrink)

The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights (...) into past and present historical cultures cannot be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures. (shrink)

J. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (R. Livingstone trans; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), ISBN 0804745226, 222 pp.

A journey from cultural memory through recall to transformation of historical grievances is elucidated with the aid of phenomenological thought. The context for this study is a conflict resolution project undertaken by the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction of the University of Virginia. Russians and Estonians of Klooga participated in a group meeting aimed at resolving ethnonational conflict. This meeting is described, and the potential of phenomenology in an interdisciplinary approach to conflict resolution is (...) explored. (shrink)

What is the role of attention in the dialectics of memory and communication? How far is attention functioning as a medium? Which role does attention play in the information management practices? Attention is not only fundamental to human existence but also to the process of understanding. If understanding is mediated by memory and communication then attention can be identified with the medium. So whenever you search to explain the role and mechanisms of memory in the information society, (...) the question of attention is asked immediately. Furthermore, attention can be analyzed under the following topics: as cognitive process, as subjective, intersubjective and cultural phenomenon, and as resource and medium within an 'Attention Economy'. Whereas the first aspect has to be seen in the context of empirical studies in psychology and cognitive sciences, the phenomenological, cultural, and economic aspects seem to have common points and similar implications in their theoretical approaches. In the last twenty years, the notion of attention has been the central core of several discourses in German phenomenology, economy and cultural studies. Similar to Georg Franck's theory of mental capitalism, the idea of an attention economy also was followed up in the American discourse. This article is supposed to explore the role of attention and its function as a medium within communication, cultural memory and science. (shrink)

A fruitful direction for research on the European cultural heritage is to adopt a transnational approach. Rather than see cultural heritage as predominantly expressed in national contexts, it could be seen as primarily transnational and as plural. Such a view would also suggest a conception of national histories as themselves products of transnational encounters. In this perspective, the European dimension is not then necessarily something over and above nations, but part of their heritage. Moreover, as fundamentally transnational, the (...) European heritage is not exclusively confined to Europe. Cultural heritage is not something that is fixed or based on an essence; it is produced and reinterpreted by social actors in different but overlapping contexts. This is also an interpretative approach that draws attention to the entangled nature of memories and especially the cultural logic by which new conceptions and narratives of heritage emerge from the encounter and entanglement of different memories. Such an approach offers new opportunities for comparative research on the European heritage as an entangled mosaic of histories and memories. This approach thus rejects not only particularistic but also universalistic ones such as alternative Eurocentric accounts. (shrink)

"The main spine of this book stems from a comprehensive series of interviews with subjects recalling their experiences of 1930s cinemagoing. Your feel the breath of life in these spectators, a rarity in film studies, thanks to the painstaking work contracting the interview subjects and recording and tabulating their testimony."- JUMPCUT In the 1930s, Britain had the highest annual per capita cinema attendance in the world, far surpassing ballroom dancing as the nation's favorite pastime. It was, as historian A.J.P. (...) Taylor said, the "essential social habit of the age." And yet, although we know something about the demographics of British cinemagoers, we know almost nothing of their experience of film, how film affected them, how it fit into their daily lives, what role cinema played in the larger culture of the time, and in what ways cinemagoing shaped the generation that came of age in the 1930s. In Dreaming of Fred and Ginger , Annette Kuhn draws upon contemporary publications, extensive interviews with cinemagoers themselves, and readings of selected film, to produce a provocative and perspective-altering ethno-historical study. Taking cinemagoers' accounts of their own experiences as both "the engine and product of investigation," Kuhn enters imaginatively into the world of 1930s cinema culture and analyzes its place in popular memory. Among the topics she examines are the physical space of the cinemas; the role film played in growing up; the experience of being a member of a cinema audience; film-inspired fantasies of American life; the importance of cinema to adolescence in offering role models, ideals of romance, as well as practical opportunities for courtship; and the sheer pleasure of watching such film stars as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Nelson Eddy, Ronald Colman, and many others. Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, with contributions to film history, cultural studies, and social history, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger offers an illuminating account of a key moment in British cultural memory. (shrink)

David Houston Jones builds a bridge between practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example performance and installation art, as well as photography. Contemporary work in these areas responds both to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. It asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual media (...) and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. Jones's analysis brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity which has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charrière, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, literary studies, modern languages, photography and critical theory. (shrink)

Self-defining memories are touchstones in individuals’ narrative identity. This is the first SDM study to compare college students from the mainland People’s Republic of China to American college students. It examined SDMs, Big Five personality traits, and memory function in 60 students from each country. Participants rated their memories for affect, recall frequency, and importance. Chinese students recalled their most positively rated memories more frequently and with greater importance, while American students did not show this pattern. American students who (...) scored higher in Openness were more likely to recall negative memories. Memory content coding revealed that Chinese students recalled significantly more guilt/shame events than American students. Further analysis indicated that these memories were particularly focused on academic performance and parental expectations. The discussion suggests that follow-up studies look at differing emotion regulation strategies in the two countries, as well as at how the two different educational systems are affecting late adolescent identity formation processes. (shrink)

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; (...) renewed attention to the institutional environments of cultural studies; and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

The volume contains ten historical theological studies tracing the significance of Luther for Protestant religious culture (mainly in the German-speaking world) since the Reformation. The approach taken is one of the history of reception: selected positions in modern Protestantism are identified as different forms of reception of Luther's theology. In the background is the view that at present a productive systematic theological approach to Luther's theology primarily requires a detailed consideration of a new Protestant religious culture.

Cultural differences occur in the use of categories to aid accurate recall of information. This study investigated whether culture also contributed to false (erroneous) memories, and extended cross-cultural memory research to Turkish culture, which is shaped by Eastern and Western influences. Americans and Turks viewed word pairs, half of which were categorically related and half unrelated. Participants then attempted to recall the second word from the pair in response to the first word cue. Responses were coded as (...) correct, as blanks, or as different types of errors. Americans committed more categorical errors than did Turks, and Turks mistakenly recalled more non-categorically related list words than did Americans. These results support the idea that Americans use categories either to organize information in memory or to support retrieval strategies to a greater extent than Turks and suggest that culture shapes not only accurate recall but also erroneous distortions of memory. (shrink)

This article argues that libation, often associated with the ancestors, artefacts, images and pre-Christian religious devotions, constitutes sources for articulating authentic African cultural history of Obang community in the Northwest Region of Cameroon. It highlights that among traditional memory carriers, the ritual of libation remains trust worthy and pervasive, even among communities challenged by globalisation and colonising effects of Christianity. The article demonstrates the immense potentials of libation as an epitome and stabiliser of cultural memory, and (...) a maxim in cultural resilience in contemporary Africa. Thus, the article calls for revisiting this ancient ritual to expose its potentials as a veritable memory repertoire in cultural-historical studies, especially at a time when social change and modernism continue to challenge the memories of traditional societies. (shrink)

This article asks whether there were, in post-dictatorship Chile, limitations of the autonomy of cultural and artistic production addressing the memory of traumatic events. In particular, the article analyzes the content and history of the production of some relevant sections of the mural painting Memoria Visual de una Nación by the Chilean artist Mario Toral. The article demonstrates that public art was an arena of struggle for the meaning of democracy during the postdictatorship period. To do this, he (...) uses concepts from post-structuralist political theory, cultural studies, the philosophy of memory, and memory studies. The article also offers an interpretation of cultural production as an open and contingent process. It concludes that the transition via transaction in Chile had a negative influence on the field of artistic production, reducing its autonomy and divergence from the dominant political discourse in the period. (shrink)

Cultures of Memory in South Asia reconfigures European representations of India as a paradigmatic extension of a classical reading, which posits the relation between text and context in a determined way. It explores the South Asian cultural response to European "textual" inheritances. The main argument of this work is that the reflective and generative nodes of Indian cultural formations are located in the configurations of memory, the body and idiom (verbal and visual), where the body or (...) the body complex becomes the performative effect and medium of articulated memories. This work advances its arguments by engaging with mnemocultures-cultures of memory-that survive and proliferate in speech and gesture. Drawing on Sanskrit and Telugu reflective sources, this work emphasizes the need to engage with cultural memory and the compositional modes of Indian reflective traditions. This important and original work focuses on the ruptured and stigmatized resources of heterogeneous Indian traditions and calls for critical humanities that move beyond the colonially configured received traditions. Cultures of Memory suggests the possibilities of transcultural critical humanities research and teaching initiatives from the Indian context in today's academy. (shrink)

The subject of our article is the identification of cultural codes of Eastern European shtetl towns in the play by Grigory Gorin "Memorial Prayer", the libretto of which was written by the author based on the works of the famous Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. The author of the article describes the history and conditions of localization of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the peculiarities of its transformation, the tragic history of the Jewish theater in the (...) first third of the twentieth century. After the disappearance of the towns and the disuse of the Yiddish language, the preservation of the history of the characteristic everyday and philosophical way of life of the shtetls became the goal of museum figures, historians, writers, playwrights, and artists. In the work, using the example of Tevye the milkman, his family and environment, characteristic images of the inhabitants of small towns, their habitat, types of thinking and actions are revealed. The article uses the methods of historicism in the retrospective of the culture of Shtetl towns, the method of analysis in the identification of Shtetl archetypes, the method of synthesis in the generalization of a set of characteristic cultural codes. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. Eastern European Jewish shtetl towns are small urban-type settlements with a predominantly Jewish population, whose unique culture was determined by the Jewish faith, everyday and religious traditions, the Yiddish language, as well as the localization of residence in a small area. 2. During the period of large-scale social upheavals of the early twentieth century and the subsequent expansion beyond the boundaries of the towns, their unique culture became a mythologeme, the foundation for writers, artists, musicians, and theater figures who emerged from it. One of the milestones in the preservation of this culture was the Jewish theater GOSET, whose existence was tragically cut short in the middle of the twentieth century. 3. The play "Memorial Prayer", written by Grigory Gorin based on the works of Sholem Aleichem and staged at the Lenkom Theater by Mark Zakharov, became the quintessence of the characteristic images of the shtetl, and at the same time the revival of authentic Jewish culture. The author's special contribution is to highlight in the play the images-the archetypes of the Shtetl, which have become cultural markers, or codes of Jewish Yiddish culture. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present study assessed the extent to which culture impacts the emotion-induced memory trade-off effect. This trade-off effect occurs because emotional items are better remembered than neutral ones, but this advantage comes at the expense of memory for backgrounds such that neutral backgrounds are remembered worse when they occurred with an emotional item than with a neutral one. Cultures differ in their prioritisation of focal object versus contextual background information, with Westerners focusing more on objects and Easterners focusing (...) more on backgrounds. Americans, a Western culture, and Turks, an Eastern-influenced culture, incidentally encoded positive, negative, and neutral items placed against neutral backgrounds, and then completed a surprise memory test with the items and backgrounds tested separately. Results revealed a reduced trade-off for Turks compared to Americans. Although both groups exhibited an emotional enhancement in item memory, Turks did not show a decrement in memory... (shrink)

This special issue, which includes papers first presented at two workshops on ‘Memory, Mind, and Media’ in Sydney on November 29–30 and December 2–3, 2004, showcases some of the best interdisciplinary work in philosophy and psychology by memory researchers in Australasia (and by one expatriate Australian, Robert Wilson of the University of Alberta). The papers address memory in many contexts: in dance and under hypnosis, in social groups and with siblings, in early childhood and in the laboratory. (...) Memory is taken as a test case for evaluating the optimistic vision of a new kind of cognitive science defended by Andy Clark. Clark (2001:154) argues: Much of what matters about human intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two ... The study of these interaction spaces is not easy, and depends both on new multidisciplinary alliances and new forms of modelling and analysis. The pay-off, however, could be spectacular: nothing less than a new kind of cognitive scientific collaboration involving neuroscience, physiology, and social, cultural, and technological studies in about equal measure. So the central motivation is to investigate critically how well the case of memory would fit the extended mind’ thesis put forward by Clark and Chalmers (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2006)—according to which mental states and processes can spread across the.. (shrink)

Speculative realism has, over the course of its rapid and controversial emergence in the past decade, been frequently criticized from the perspective of historical materialism, for its putative reliance on abstraction and eschewal of a sufficiently rigorous ideological alignment. This paper takes such critiques as a starting point for an examination of the contributions recent thought in the area of speculative realism has to offer the study of the humanities – specifically, the study of literature and literary history. In particular, (...) contemporary realist thought has the potential to enable scholars of literature to move beyond the anthropocentric and specialized notions of history as an exclusively cultural entity, which have dominated the discipline since the twentieth century. Paying especially close attention to the work of Graham Harman and Manuel DeLanda, it is my argument that emergent realist philosophy offers literary scholars a set of powerful conceptual tools which can be put toward the work of accounting for the hitherto neglected ontological status of the literary text – illuminating the status of the text as a particular variety of real and physical object that participates in a system of real and physical history and memory. (shrink)

The book analyses a variety of topics and current issues in linguistics and literary studies, focusing especially on such aspects as memory, identity and cognition. Firstly, it discusses the notion of memory and the idea of reimagining, as well as coming to terms with the past. Secondly, it studies the relationship between perception, cognition and language use. It then investigates a variety of practices of language users, language learners and translators, such as the use of borrowings (...) from hip-hop and slang. The book is intended for researchers in the fields of linguistics and literary studies, lecturers teaching undergraduate and master's students on courses in language and literature. (shrink)

This book explores questions surrounding material memory, culture and technology, and examines the active and constitutive role that technical artefacts play in our practices of memory. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book’s argument includes themes unusual in memory studies, such as the production of technology and the concept of nature.