Formation Of Cultural Memory Research Articles

Value orientations of youth and the formation of cultural memory in the region (On the example of the Chechen republic)

The article analyzes the characteristics of the Chechen youth, their value attitudes and roles in the formation of cultural memory. The methodological framework covers theoretical and methodological areas of research of two social phenomena that are important signs of the changing world at the beginning of this millennium: cultural memory and the attitude of the younger generation towards it. The analysis of these phenomena is studied on the example of a specific region as a social space at a certain stage of socio-public transformation, where the foundations of traditional society with the prevalence of vertical connections continue to play an important role. At the same time, young people have a special place in the perception and transformation of values, experiencing at the same time a great influence of globalization and information technologies. The empirical basis of the study was socio-demographic data on the Chechen Republic, quantitative and qualitative methods of surveying the youth of the republic: an online survey was conducted among students (N = 92) aged 19-24 years and in-depth interviews among young people (N = 21), whose average age was 30 years. Additional materials were data from the database of surveys and focus groups collected in recent years. The results of the study showed that the transformation of cultural memory in the region is influenced by both structural factors, primarily demographic, migration dynamics, socio-economic living conditions of the population, etc., and cultural and institutional factors that determine the value attitudes of various segments of the population, the discourses prevailing in the society, attitudes to history, politics, etc. The value landmarks of young people play an important role in the formation of the cultural memory of the Chechen society and act as means of stabilizing and renewing the society. A key feature of the Chechen society is a respect towards elders. The succession of values is under threat of breaking intergenerational ties and subject to an unprecedented information aggression. The issues of an objective attitude to history, developing a position on the modernization of the society are acute.

The Aesthetic Mediation of Cultural Memory: Two Case Studies from Papua New Guinea and Kimberley, Australia

Abstract I offer an analysis of the role of aesthetic value in the formation of cultural memory. More specifically, I examine how cultural memory is formed through cultural artifacts that embody a connection to the past via aesthetic means. My approach is motivated by artifacts from small-scale preindustrial societies, which make it apparent that aesthetic values, rather than being pursued for their own sake alone, enhance other functions, such as maintaining cultural identity and bringing the past into the present. I focus on rock art painting from the Kimberley, Australia, and effigies animated during rituals in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea to argue that, to play a significant role in the formation of cultural memory, aesthetic value must be aligned with implicit conceptions of time which inform the production of artifacts mediating cultural memory. This argument has implications for understanding differences in apprehending memory values and aesthetic values across cultural domains.

Internet memes as heritage in becoming and its problems: The methodology of heritization and the formation of cultural memory in cyberspace

After defining Internet memes and their place within broader popular culture, this paper examines the methodology and interpretation of a large-scale collection of Internet memes used by the KnowYourMeme database. By observing the changed context in which Internet memes are created, shared, or forgotten, questions are raised about the formation of meme cultural memory in cyberspace, leading to critical commentary on the ways in which they are collected. By analyzing the heritization of Internet memes, this paper addresses the following issues: the formation of the future meme heritage, scope of cultural memory in cyberspace, redefinition of remembering and forgetting within the panmnemonic tendencies of online heritage projects. Using the KnowYourMeme database as an example, the problems of cyberspace heritage are discussed, and the different online projects dealing with Internet memes as heritage are compared. By defining ?on-the-fly? memory, which indicates the simultaneity of the process of creating and preserving heritage, this paper offers a critical review of the existing cyber projects of ?saving everything?.

Home Movie as a Text of Cultural Memory

The aim of this article is to define home movie as a text of cultural memory and reveal the dynamics of its meanings in culture. The personal and the collective maintenance and transmission of memory is a complex mechanism that operates within a dynamic cultural model. The analysis of this mechanism considers the way in which something that first appears to be culturally irrelevant – a private home movie of a family – is brought into the public space and circulates as a cultural text contributing to the preservation and formation of cultural memory. The analysis describes home movie in the framework of semiotics and reveals the meaning shifts that occur when private memory texts begin to circulate in a more general cultural context. The mechanism of the dynamics of cultural texts and the problematics of memory are explored using Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics approach. The example of Lithuanian director’s Dovilė Šarutytė’s debut feature film A Feature Film About Life (2021) is used to describe in more detail the transformations of meaning that home movies undergo after becoming a cultural text.

Civilizational Changes in the Post-Soviet Space and the Decommunization of Society

The article defines civilization as a human community. which for a certain period of time (the process of origin, development, death or transformation of civilization) has stable special features in socio-political organization, economy and culture (science, technology, art, etc.) common spiritual values and ideals, mentality (worldview). The question of the regionality of the civilization to which Ukraine belongs, as well as its limitrophy, ie the intermediate between Western European and Eurasian civilizations, is raised. It is emphasized that Ukraine's civilizational progress in Europe is intensified by the decommunization of the social and political life of our society. Decommunization is one of the few reforms that has been implemented since the Revolution of Dignity. With the adoption of decommunization laws, the policy of changing the historical narrative and the formation of cultural memory became official and purposeful. This process has an objective basis, its cataloging was the events of Euromaidan, but even more so - the Russian war against Ukraine. At the same time, it is impossible not to mention the influence of the past on ways of thinking and social structure, ie historical memory. The article notes that the process of creating new memorable meanings in a transitional society is a necessary condition for overcoming the dualism of the historical memory of Ukrainians. In this sense, the state policy of memory should be focused on the destruction of totalitarian attitudes and stereotypes, the formation of a unifying system of values.

‘Cadáveres Amados’: Martyrs, Memory, and Cuban National Symbols

Abstract On November 27th, 1871, eight young medical students were marched into a public plaza in Havana and shot by Spanish authorities. On the first anniversary of their death, the exiled José Martí used their execution to denounce Spanish rule in Cuba, and to legitimize the violent struggle for Cuban Independence. The executed students became martyrs to Cuban nationalism. Since then, their execution at the hands of tyrants has been repeatedly repurposed in revolutionary periods in Cuban history. This article engages with the work of Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assmann, and Pierre Nora to reflect on the process of collective and cultural memory formation and reformation. It considers the factors that contributed to the transformation of the execution of these students from a singular tragedy, among a wider field of atrocity, into a defining moment in Cuban identity. Further, drawing on works by Jay Winter, Robin Cohen, and Ron Eyerman, this article interrogates the role of individuals and groups in this process. Over one hundred and fifty years, members of exile communities, moral witnesses, student protesters, and revolutionary leaders used the memory of these martyrs to contest authoritarian rule, hoping to advance their vision of a Cuba that could be. Driven by changing political imperatives, the memory of the students altered to reflect new collective priorities. This case study shows change and continuity in cultural memory. Tracing the evolution of this narrative from the Cuban War of Independence, through the rule of dictators, Castro’s revolutionary war, and the following socialist era, this article concludes by asking how their memory is being—once again—transformed today. With a focus on the construction and use of public monuments and memorials, but incorporating literature, images, annual marches, and films, this article argues that the public memory of their deaths altered in different periods to invoke a revolutionary vision of Cuban national identity battered by a century and a half of instability.

Актуальность межтекстовых связей при изучении творчества А.А. Ахматовой

The author’s goal is to justify the contextual approach to studying the works of A.A. Akhmatova at school basing on the features of the poet’s oeuvre, as well as the tasks that a teacher of literature faces today: the development of logical and metaphorical thinking, interpretative abilities, interest in the subject, and formation of cultural memory. The presented materials are based on the analysis of the research that reflects the leading trends in the field of methods of teaching literature, and the results of pedagogical practice. We propose planning lessons on the work of A.A. Akhmatova in the light of intertextual links, examples of tasks for each of the topics, and we also suggest one of the possible options for comparative analysis based on the method of slow reading of poems by A.A. Akhmatova and A.S. Pushkin. Methodological materials were tested in school and gymnasium practice of teaching the subject «Literature» and confirmed their effectiveness.

Переміщені українці повоєнної Західної Німеччини та формування культурної пам’яті

Переміщені українці повоєнної Західної Німеччини та формування культурної пам’яті

IGOR DJORDJEVIC. King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory.

IGOR DJORDJEVIC. King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory.

King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory by Igor Djordjevic

Reviewed by: King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory by Igor Djordjevic Tom Rutter (bio) Igor Djordjevic. King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xii + 204. $109.95. It has become a critical commonplace that King John was a figure laden with significance for Elizabethan historical dramatists. Maligned by medieval commentators such as Matthew Paris, who wrote that hell itself was made fouler by the dead monarch, after the Reformation John could be seen on the strength of his quarrel with the Papacy as a kind of dry run for Henry VIII. John Bale, for example, would cast “noble kynge Iohan” as Moses to Henry’s Joshua, with the later king finally leading the English to “the lande of mylke and honye” (King Johan, ed. John Henry Pyle Pafford, Malone Society Reprints, 1931; 1097, 1103). In King John (Mis)Remembered, however, Igor Djordjevic offers a much more nuanced picture of John’s literary afterlife. For one thing, he brings together materials that have tended to interest different groups of critics: historical chronicles, the King John plays of George Peele and William Shakespeare, the Admiral’s Men plays about Robin Hood, and Samuel Daniel’s Jacobean historiography. For another, some of the plays he considers, such as the anonymous Look About You and Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda, have largely failed to capture the interest even of aficionados of obscure early modern drama. This gives his book admirable range and ambition. Of crucial importance in Djordjevic’s account is the Dunmow Chronicle, a medieval text partially reproduced in John Stow’s Chronicles of England of 1580. This fragment offers a fanciful account of thirteenth-century history including a sympathetic portrayal of the feudal magnate Robert FitzWalter who, not coincidentally, was a major benefactor of the Augustine priory at Little Dunmow, Essex. In a version of history overlooked by other Elizabethan chroniclers, it attributes the baronial wars to a “discord” that arose “because of Mawde called the Faire, daughter to Robert Fitz Water, whome the King loued, but hir father woulde not consente” (The Chronicles of England, London, 1580; 242). Although ignored by Peele and Shakespeare, whose dramatic treatments of King John Djordjevic discusses in his second chapter, the Dunmow narrative evidently interested some [End Page 123] writers. One was Michael Drayton, who used it as the basis for his 1594 poem Matilda, and for a dialogue in Englands Heroicall Epistles; Djordjevic suggests that Drayton saw in the story “an English historical world-changing exemplum to rival the tragic power of Tarquin and Lucrece” (59). Another was Anthony Munday, who seems to have been the first dramatist to associate King John with Robin Hood (in his Earl of Huntingdon plays). As with Drayton, Djordjevic finds Munday in these plays using the story of John and Maud/Matilda as a means of figuring something bigger: “the role of a king’s overwhelming passions in the history of a nation” (84). While this treatment of Munday as a serious, historically aware dramatist rather than a theatrical hack is welcome, it does, however, involve a marginalizing of Robin Hood as merely a “device” (93) for the plays’ exploration of John’s kingship—a reading I find overstated given how insistently the frame narrative presents The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon as a play about Robin Hood. It also involves a marginalizing of Henry Chettle—not merely the reviser of Munday’s work, as Djordjevic has it (73), but apparently a substantial contributor to Part Two, for which the Admiral’s Men paid him twenty shillings in comparison to Munday’s fifteen (although Philip Henslowe’s records do not specify how the remaining balance was allocated) (Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2002; 87). As the reviser of Stow’s Survey of London, and a figure of notoriously uncertain religious sympathies, Munday fits much more neatly than Chettle into Djordjevic’s overall narrative. Djordjevic’s reading of Look About You characterizes it, like the Huntingdon plays, as...

King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory. Igor Djordjevic. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. xii + 204 pp. $109.95.

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Performing Cultural Memory: The Travelling Hibernicon and the Transnational Irish Community in the United States and Australia

The proliferation of popular touring companies in the late nineteenth century provides an opportunity to explore how popular ideas of Irishness travelled and transformed across national borders. Through its international reach and unique form, the hibernicon — an Irish variation on the moving panorama — had the potential to create an imagined collectivity among Irish emigrants and their descendants in the US and Australia. Looking at the hibernicon and transnational theatre emphasises the ways that performances of cultural memory shift over time and are dependent not only on the relationship of the Irish to homeland, but also the transnational relationships among those who have left. The hibernicon highlights the crucial role popular entertainment played in conversations about cultural memory and demonstrates the importance of transnationalism in cultural memory's formation.

Der Kanon im Archiv

AbstractSignificant materials produced by German-Jewish writers, artists and scholars have been preserved in public archives as well as in private family collections in Israel. Many of these materials were salvaged from Nazi Germany and brought to Israel with considerable difficulty during the years 1933-1945, or in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah. The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, Bonn University and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach have begun a joint project to make these archival collections more accessible in Israel and to initiate new research based on them. Against this background, the article explores the role of archival processing in the construction of historical knowledge and the formation of cultural memory.

Omar al-Mukhtar: the formation of cultural memory and the case of the militant group that bears his name

This paper investigates how the martyr figure of Omar al-Mukhtar (1858–1931) became a popular transnational icon in Africa, Asia and the Arab world. Originally part of the history of Cyrenaica, Omar al-Mukhtar became part of Arab culture during the struggle against colonialism and is now part of a suggested Arab ‘imagined community’. The paper explores how his memory has been shaped in new and multiple ways in contemporary culture and politics of Middle East and North Africa. Al-Mukhtar's historic character has crossed the Libyan boundaries and the Cyrenaican leader became instrumental not only in the history of modern Libya, but contributed to the formation of different forms of Arab nationalism during their struggle against colonialism. The authors investigate how the construction of martyrdom developed and show that the pattern of collective memory did not proceed unambiguously. Further, they demonstrate how the martyr's legacy has been and is still utilised for political mobilisation and make the case by studying the activities of transnational insurrection groups – the ‘brigades’ or ‘forces of Omar al-Mukhtar’ from its original inceptions to recent occurrences.

"On the Natural History of Destruction" and Cultural Memory: W. G. Sebald

Benjamin's well-known emblematic description of the rememberer as an archaeologist in "Excavation and Memory" is a fitting point of departure to explore the meaning, transmission, and form of cultural memory as a methodology and a subject in German studies. In this article, I explore the shift toward a renewed materiality of memory in fields such as archaeology and disaster studies that have been tangential to the discourses of cultural memory based on trauma and on identity politics prevalent in German cultural studies. After describing current practice in these fields and their relevance to the formation of cultural memory within the context of German studies, I then read the writing of W.G. Sebald within the framework of archaeological tropes in which the spaces dedicated to the dead play a major role. The close reading of Sebald's text serves as a model for re-reading other contemporary German literary texts within the broader context of other disciplinary approaches to the space of memory in the aftermath of atrocity.

Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans

This article seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions on the workings of cultural memory and examines in particular the way in which literary texts can function as a social framework for memory. Through a detailed study of the genesis, composition, and long-term reception of Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (1982 [1818]), I argue that literary texts play a variety of roles in the formation of cultural memory and that these roles are linked to their status as public discourse, to their fictional and poetical qualities, and to their longevity. This analysis of the multiple roles of literary texts in what I call “memorial dynamics” sheds light on the complex communicative processes by which images of the past are formed and transformed over time. It indicates the need to consider discontinuity as a feature of memorial dynamics and to recognize, for better or for worse, that fictionality and poeticity are an integral and not merely“inauthentic” feature of cultural memory.