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- Inventing the Past
Inventing the Past
Angebote / Angebote:
Our age is obsessed with memory: its specter haunts an array of activities, intellectual, creative, and commercial, its processes shadow our individual and collective lives. And yet, despite this ubiquity, the idea of memory remains elusive and forever mutable, for depending on the context in which it is thought and the purpose for which it is intended, it takes on a range of forms. The twelve essays assembled here reflect a variety of approaches to the phenomenon of memory: historical, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic. They read the relationship between history and memory as well as between natural and artificial memory, locate memory as a critical staging of the past, analyse the links between memory and mimesis, reflect on reminiscence as an acknowledgment of otherness, and consider the relationships among nostalgia, melancholy, and trauma, the legal claims of memory, and the challenges of witnessing the past. Common to all the essays is an interest in the imaginative potential inherent in memory and a concern with the ethical implications of any invention of the past.