Memory and Rhetoric

Abstract

For several decades now the role of public memory in shaping the present has occupied the attention of scholars across the humanities. From Holocaust studies to architecture, literature and → visual culture, colonialism, and queer theory, students of the subject are seeking to explain how and to what ends we avail ourselves of the past. Among the most recent and instructive contributions to this enterprise are those issuing from the study of rhetoric, which attends in particular to the discursive and strategic dimensions of public memory (→ Rhetorical Studies).