A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies

An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook

Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9783110229981
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110207262
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This handbook represents the interdisciplinary and international field of "cultural memory studies" for the first time in one volume. Articles by renowned international scholars offer readers a unique overview of the key concepts of cultural memory studies. The handbook not only documents current research in an unprecedented way; it also serves as a forum for bringing together approaches from areas as varied as sociology, political sciences, history, theology, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences.
"Cultural memory studies" – as defined in this handbook – came into being at the beginning of the 20th century, with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on mémoire collective. In the course of the last two decades this area of research has witnessed a veritable boom in various countries and disciplines. As a consequence, the study of the relation of "culture" and "memory" has diversified into a wide range of approaches. This handbook is based on a broad understanding of "cultural memory" as the interplay of present and past in sociocultural contexts. It presents concepts for the study of individual remembering in a social context, group and family memory, national memory, the various media of memory, and finally the host of emerging transnational lieux de mémoire such as 9/11.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Table of Contents
• Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction
• Loci memoriae—Lieux de mémoire
• Italian luoghi della memoria
• Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire
• Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures
• Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War
• Memory and the History of Mentalities
• The Invention of Cultural Memory
• Canon and Archive
• Communicative and Cultural Memory
• Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and Memory
• Cultural Memory: A European Perspective
• Maurice Halbwachs’s mémoire collective
• From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products
• Memory in Post-Authoritarian Societies
• Memory and Politics
• Social Forgetting: A Systems-Theory Approach
• Memory and Remembrance: A Constructivist Approach
• Memory and Forgetting in Paul Ricoeur’s Theory ofthe Capable Self
• Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present
• Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma
• Experience and Memory: Imaginary Futures in the Past
• A Cognitive Taxonomy of Collective Memories
• Language and Memory: Social and Cognitive Processes
• Cultural Memory and the Neurosciences
• Communicative Memory
• Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature
• Cultural Memory and the Literary Canon
• Life-Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies
• The Literary Representation of Memory
• The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing
• The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History
• The Photograph as Externalization and Trace
• Journalism’s Memory Work
• Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory
• Memory and Media Cultures
• Backmatter