Memory, art and the social condition

Abstract

ABSTRACTTheodor Adorno once famously declared: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. An opposing proposition: without poetry, and more generally speaking, without the arts, we cannot successfully confront modern barbarism. This paper explores this opposing proposition by closely analysing three works of art and how they have made it possible to confront difficult pasts – Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Paweł Pawlikowski’s film, Ida, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The central argument of the paper is that it is particularly in the creation and appreciation of art that the challenges of memory (and forgetting), as important dilemmas knitted into the fabric of social life, ‘the social condition’, are successfully confronted.