Creative Memory and Painful Pasts

Abstract

The major preoccupation of this book has been with how memory and imagination operate in conjunction with each other in a necessary alliance that helps us develop our understanding of temporal processes and maintain the past as a dynamic presence within an ever-changing present. We have introduced the concept of mnemonic imagination in order to show this alliance in operation both in personal life and in public culture. The concept encompasses the fertile ways in which memory and the imagination are interactive, working on each other in various manifestations. They require each other in moving beyond their own limits as we think of the patterns of change and continuity in our sense of ourselves over time, and the diverse ways in which the past is represented and used as a resource in all aspects of cultural life. The mnemonic imagination is vital for the many different forms of everyday creativity that help to give our lives structure and purpose, meaning and value. Some of these are developed further and receive more formal recognition as artistic or cultural attainments, in genres that run the gamut of artistic expression from popular song to musical theatre, from the novel to installation art, and from documentary film to folk museums; but the mnemonic imagination operates across otherwise quite distinct cultural forms and fields, and is not circumscribed by any particular realm that, for whatever reason, may be hierarchically elevated above others.