Nostalgia Culture Research Articles

The Smells, Sights, and Pleasures of Ink on Paper: The Consumption of Print Newspapers During a Period Marked by Their Crisis

ABSTRACTMuch has been written about the crisis of print newspapers, but with more attention paid to issues of production and distribution rather than reception. Furthermore, the scholarship on contemporary print newspaper reception has been limited by a focus on the information dimension and on countries in the Global North. To help overcome these limitations, in this paper we ask two questions that inquire into the reception of print newspapers in the contemporary media environment, and do so within a country from the Global South. Drawing upon an analysis of 158 semi-structured interviews conducted in the City of Buenos Aires and other parts of the country, we find that people continue reading print newspapers not solely, or even primarily, for the information contained in their pages, but for dynamics that tie together news content with materiality, routinization, and larger practices of incorporation of this media artifact into their daily lives. These dynamics are partly shaped by distinctive aspects of the Argentine context, including business strategies, family rituals, urban patterns, and a culture of nostalgia.

When Generational Media Memories Meet the Internet: The Case of Jugonostalgija on Instagram

Social media represent a space that allows users to collect memories and, by sharing them, to connect with those who think and feel the same about the past. In this paper we analyze the intergenerational case of Jugonostalgija on Instagram where users are rebuilding a socio-cultural yugoslav sphere in a tension among ‘culture of nostalgia’ and ‘nostalgic culture’ (Velikonja, 2008), playing different languages and aesthetics, producing content that refer to the same cultural references of the past. This allows them to respond to the need of reaffirming a common ‘we sense’, a feeling of belonging above the borders, prohibited by the national states. By a qualitative contents analysis of 52 Instagram accounts related to Yugoslavia, we observed the generational relation between media and time in Jugonostalgija. The findings of this work allow us to build a theoretical framework combining the nature of media content (UGC and mainstream media) with the temporal dimension the content refers to (Yugo and post-Yugo). This produces four areas ‒ Belonging, Competence, Creativity and Distance ‒ assembled in two pairs according to the kind of content they use, operationalising the dimension of restorative and reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001).

In Memoriam: Susan Hawkins (1946–2016)

We mourn the loss of Susan Hawkins, respected member of the Cormac McCarthy Society and participant in many Society-sponsored conferences and activities. Professor Hawkins earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Portland State University and in 1981 received her PhD from the University of Oregon with a dissertation, “The Poetics of the Postmodern American Prose Poem.” She was a poet herself, and her love of the power of language guided her reading, research, and teaching interests. She held teaching positions at the University of Kansas and Lewis and Clark University before settling for most of her career at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. There she taught modern and contemporary fiction and poetry to undergraduates and Master's candidates and served as English Department Chair in her last five years before retiring in 2012.Professor Hawkins won various awards and grants, among which was a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Bulgaria, but she was proudest of receiving the Oakland University Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. The university's most distinguished teaching award, it is given to one faculty member per year chosen from across the university's disciplines.Those who attend conferences and panels on Cormac McCarthy will remember Susan's work on Cold War themes, American imperialism, and end-times in McCarthy's later works. Her “Cold War Cowboys and the Culture of Nostalgia” (Cormac McCarthy International Conference, University of Reims, France, 2002), was selected for inclusion in Christine Chollier's Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories. Other presentations include “Renegotiating the Border(s): Cormac McCarthy's Revisionist Western Romance” (Great Lakes American Studies Association Annual Conference, 1997); “‘Tryin to Minimize the Pain’: The End of Things in Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain” (Cormac McCarthy Annual Conference, Austin, 2000); “Out of the Preterite World: Crossing into the Cold War” (American Literature Association, Boston, 2005); and “Historical Endings, Vestigial Times: Cormac McCarthy's The Road” (American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction, San Diego, 2006). In the final years of her career, Professor Hawkins undertook an extended research project entitled “Chronicles of the Late World: Cormac McCarthy's The Road,” and she delivered a series of related papers from this project at the American Literature Association in Boston, 2007; the Cormac McCarthy Society International Conference in Warwick, England, 2009; and the American Literature Association Fiction Symposium, Savannah, 2011.Society members will miss Professor Hawkins' wit and humor, her feistiness, her capacity for friendship, and her support for the work of her colleagues and students.

Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and The Legacies of War

This essay seeks to use a history of listening to Richard Strauss’s late work for strings Metamorphosen as a way of exploring hitherto under-researched legacies of the Second World War for German society. Situating the popular reception of the piece within histories of memory, the emotions, and the senses, it posits the existence of a ‘period ear’ in the immediate post-war period; that ‘period ear’, it argues, attests to the presence of affective legacies of the war lost to subsequent generations. Specifically, it argues for the presence of a peculiar culture of nostalgia for the Wilhelmine era in the 1950s and 1960s that was displaced by a later generation of listeners focused on the music’s alleged evocation of traumatic wartime memories. Its wider argument rests on a plea to recognize problem spaces that sit less at the interstices of two particular disciplines than in fields framed by scholarly discourses of concern to a multitude of disciplines.

Broadcasting the Past: History Television, “Nostalgia Culture,” and the Emergence of the Miniseries in the 1970s United States

:New forms of history television in the 1970s responded to and helped articulate a larger “nostalgia culture.” But this culture was not about escapism or a longing for a lost and irretrievable past, instead evidencing a new form of historical consciousness that allowed for closer identification and for a reevaluation of the past and the present. Television, because of its generic qualities of live delivery, immediacy, and intimacy, was particularly well positioned to illustrate and negotiate this shift. An examination of history programming, particularly the emergence of miniseries such as Roots, casts light upon these new forms of narrativization and identification.