Landsberg Prosthetic Memory

The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-0-231-50313-6
Verlag: Columbia University Press
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Instead of compartmentalizing American experience, the technologies of mass culture make it possible for anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender to share collective memories--to assimilate as personal experience historical events through which they themselves did not live. That's the provocative argument of this book, which examines the formation and potential of privately felt public memories. Alison Landsberg argues that mass cultural forms such as cinema and television in fact contain the still-unrealized potential for a progressive politics based on empathy for the historical experiences of others. The result is a new form of public cultural memory--"prosthetic" memory--that awakens the potential in American society for increased social responsibility and political alliances that transcend the essentialism and ethnic particularism of contemporary identity politics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Landsberg, Alison

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction:Memory, Modernity, Mass Culture
Chapter One:Prosthetic Memory
Chapter Two:The Prosthetic Imagination: Immigration Narratives and the 'Melting Down' of Difference
Chapter Three: Remembering Slavery: Childhood, Desire, and the Interpellative Power of the Past
Chapter Four:America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: The 'Object' of Remembering
Epilogue:Towards a Radical Practice of Memory

Über Autor(innen)

Alison Landsberg is assistant professor of American cultural history at George Mason University. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.