The Promise of Nostalgia

Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Culture

Nicola Sayers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429632518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts – including The Virgin Suicides, both the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides' and Sofia Coppola's screen adaptation, photography of Detroit's 'abandoned spaces', and blogger Tavi Gevinson's media output – to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production.

Counter to the prevalent caricature of nostalgia as anti-future, the book proposes a more nuanced reading of its stakes and meanings. Instead of understanding it as evidence of the absence of utopia it contends that there is a masked utopian impulse in this nostalgia 'mode' and critical potential in what has typically been dismissed as ideological.

This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students interested in contemporary culture, cultural theory, media studies, the Frankfurt School, utopian studies and American literature and culture.

Part I

1 Nostalgia

Is it really not what it used to be?

‘Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.’ This remark was originally a lightly mocking quip at the nostalgic’s capacity to make anything, even nostalgia itself, the subject of fond reminiscence. It is often invoked more pointedly by contemporary theorists, who use it to suggest that nostalgia has actually changed in recent years or decades, that it now has a different quality.¹ But does it? And if it does, then it what ways, and why? This chapter will provide an overview of influential theories of and ideas about nostalgia via a history of the concept and of literature on the topic. How did nostalgia, originally a term for a specific medical condition, come to be understood as a symptom of the modern age? Why has nostalgia been alternatively described as an anti-modern sentiment and as a peculiarly modern phenomenon? And most recently: What is meant by postmodern nostalgia as a consumer mode? Susan Sontag suggests that ‘the two poles of distinctively modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia’.² The story of utopia’s rise and fall in modernity is well known, or at least much discussed, if not always agreed on. The story of nostalgia’s complex relationship to modernity, and how that has been differently perceived, is less prolifically written about but no less interesting.

A useful starting point is Andrew Higson’s account of nostalgia as a changing concept.³ He outlines three key stages of its development. First, the term described a physical condition provoked by geographical dislocation and a desire to return home; then it came to denote a psychological condition typified by temporal longing for a time gone by; more recently, it has been used to describe a socio-cultural condition that is atemporal, referring not to a longing for the past but to a consumer mode and way of relating to certain styles. Beginning within these broad parameters, I will at each stage draw attention to complexities, inconsistencies and outstanding questions vis-à-vis the status and understanding of nostalgia.

A medical origin: longing for home

The term nostalgia derives from the Greek roots nostos and algia. Nostos means homecoming, and algia denotes a painful condition. Interestingly, Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, a prominent contemporary study of nostalgia, mistakenly translates the Greek term algia as meaning longing.⁴ The connotation of longing is not in fact present in the original Greek algia, which denotes pain, but the fact that Boym’s minor mistranslation went unnoticed is perhaps indicative of how central longing has become to the meaning of nostalgia.

The semantic origins of the word nostalgia were carefully considered by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who first coined the term in his medical dissertation in 1688. He writes in his introduction:

Nor in truth, deliberating on a name, did a more suitable one occur to me, defining the thing to be explained, more concisely than the word Nostalgia, Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nostos, return to the native land; the other Algos, signifies suffering or grief.⁵

The new medical term that Hofer introduced described a kind of acute homesickness. The nostalgic was someone who experienced an intense longing for his native land. The condition was originally associated with Swiss soldiers fighting abroad, although also associated with other displaced peoples, such as students studying abroad and domestic helpers working abroad.⁶ As Higson’s association of the original term with a ‘physical condition’ suggests, the person suffering from nostalgia manifested actual physical symptoms – such as fever, nausea and loss of appetite – even though the cause may have been psychological. It is unclear whether Hofer was merely describing and medicalising a long-existing experience, or whether, and to what extent, his naming of the disease coincided with increasing incidences of the experience. Boym suggests that naming it may have ‘enhanced the epidemic’.⁷ What is clear is that over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries nostalgia became well established as a disease. As Roth points out in his study of the medicalisation of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France, ‘the disease attracted considerable medical attention, discussion and intervention’.⁸

Modern nostalgia: longing for lost time

By the start of the twentieth century the meaning of the word nostalgia had shifted dramatically. First, it became ‘semantically unmoored from its medical basis’ and entered into popular vocabularies across Europe as a widely recognised term.⁹ The new general concept was no longer associated with physical symptoms, as had characterised the medical definition of nostalgia, but came to describe a purely psychological state. It is not clear exactly when this popular usage of the term gained traction. Heike Jenß states that the meaning of the term shifted in the first half of the nineteenth century and Pickering and Keightley suggest that it happened gradually over several centuries.¹⁰ What is clear is that by the twentieth century, as Hutcheon poignantly observes, this curable medical condition became an incurable condition of the spirit or psyche.¹¹

The second significant shift was from spatial to temporal dimensions. Rather than signifying a longing for a missed geographical place, as it had originally, nostalgia came instead to connote a longing towards a missed time. The Oxford English Dictionary points out that the English term nostalgia is associated with the German word Heimweh or ‘homesickness’ (Hofer’s dissertation was in fact titled Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimweh). The association with a kind of homesickness remained; however, it came to connote ‘a sort of homesickness for a lost past’ – a temporal dislocation, ‘the sense of feeling oneself a stranger in a new period that contrasted negatively with an earlier time in which one felt, or imagined, oneself at home’.¹² Although the retained association with ‘home’ is significant (this will be further analysed in Chapter 3), there is an obvious but crucial distinction between a spatially distant home and a temporally distant home: the latter, unlike the former, can never actually be returned to. Hutcheon puts it simply: ‘Nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact’ (the irreversibility of time).¹³

The distinction between spatial and temporal nostalgia is of course not clear-cut. As Higson observes, ‘the nostalgic past is almost always a place as well as a time’.¹⁴ Likewise, nostalgia for a place is often associated with a particular time. Hutcheon picks up on an observation made by Kant as early as 1798 that people who did return home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not simply desire a lost place, but also a time, a time of youth.¹⁵ However, the new focus on time, rather than place, was nonetheless a qualitative shift which carried with it different resonances. The loss evoked by ‘lost time’ is a wistful yearning – tinged both by the hopeless impossibility of ever actually going back in time, and the experience in dream or fantasy of having somehow returned. Already widely resonant at the turn of the century, Grainge points out that this new sense of nostalgia was given further voice by ‘the triangulation of Freud, Proust and Faulkner’ who ‘problematized and poeticized the experience of melancholy, memory and nostalgia’.¹⁶ The modern notion of nostalgia, imbued as it is with a poetic and philosophical longing, had fully emerged.

Nostalgia versus modernity

The understanding of nostalgia as anti-modern has a long history and is related to the deep and long-standing association between modernity and progress. The ideal of progress emerged during the Enlightenment, notably in Immanuel Kant’s famous 1784 essay, What is Enlightenment?¹⁷ It has since come to feature in our understanding of what is meant by modern so prominently that many theorists and historians have suggested that a normative concept of progress is at the heart of the definition of modernity. Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, writes that the term modern ‘was situated in a conceptual framework of presumed endlessness of technological progress, and therefore of endless innovation’.¹⁸ More specifically, Pickering and Keightley point out that classical sociology assumed a complete rupture between modern and premodern societies and that the present was positively valued over the past as progress.¹⁹

Given that nostalgia is enamoured with the past, it is not surprising that it was ‘negatively othered as progress’s opposite’.²⁰ If modernity is characterised by future-orientation and progress, then arguably anything that is past-oriented is by default anti-modern. Bruno Latour emphasises this point:

The adjective ‘modern’ designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. When the word ‘modern’, ‘modernization’, or ‘modernity’ appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. Furthermore, the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are win...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• References
• Index