Interest In Memory Research Articles

The Past Under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary

This article seeks to explore some particularities of history writing in the present. It considers in turn the meanings of the contemporary interest in memory, the different ways in which ideas about and images of the past circulate through the mass-mediated public sphere of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the complexities of publicness and the public sphere, and the shifting boundaries between popular ideas of the past and changes in the discipline of history. It then turns to the example of (West) Germany between the 1960s and now. The article concludes with some reflections on changing perceptions of the overall character of the twentieth century.

Archivar en la nube: reglas de producción del documento contemporáneo. Parte I: Indicadores tecnológicos

Based on our assertion that current record preservation systems are not feasible in the long term for reasons of scale and cost, we explore the current technological environment where records are created, paying special attention to phenomena such as distributed systems, cloud computing and web 2.0. In two future articles 1) we will explore the social environment where this creation is performed, with special attention to the lack of interest in memory and accountability, and 2) we will suggest a potential scenario for recordkeeping that archivists will have to address at the short term.

Frank Ankersmit's narrative substance: A legacy to historians

This essay is not intended as a critique of Ankersmit's theorisations, neither in the general nor in the particular. Rather, it will focus on Ankersmit's concept of the narrative substance at an explanatory level only, expressly in order to advance the arguments herein. To be more precise, I will explore two very significant points which, it appears to me, unquestionably arise out of this specific element of Ankersmit's wider thesis. In doing so I hope to illustrate the inescapable centrality of language in historical theory – a matter which has been pushed to one side, or wholly excluded, following the recent fashionable growth of interest in memory and experience studies.

La cultura histórica: una aproximación diferente a la memoria colectiva

Starting from the theoretical approaches of various European scholars, this article presents a conceptual framework to study social memory. In the first part, the author examines the reasons for the social and academic interest in memory, and considers some objections to the concept of collective memory. In the second part, taking the concept of “historical culture” as a starting point, the author formulates a different perspective on social memory. Historical culture may be defined as the array of social praxes and resources, by means of which the members of a community interpret, transmit, objectify and use their past. Finally, the author analyzes the agents and elements of historical culture and suggests a methodology to study the socio-communicative systems in which citizens’ historical awareness is forged.

Memory for moving and static images

Despite the substantial interest in memory for complex pictorial stimuli, there has been virtually no research comparing memory for static scenes with that for their moving counterparts. We report that both monochrome and color moving images are better remembered than static versions of the same stimuli at retention intervals up to one month. When participants studied a sequence of still images, recognition performance was the same as that for single static images. These results are discussed within a theoretical framework which draws upon previous studies of scene memory, face recognition, and representational momentum.

Sites of memory in the Holy Land: the design of the British war cemeteries in Mandate Palestine

British war cemeteries of WW1 form a world embracing system of cemeteries, scattered over a wide range of sites and landscapes wherever Imperial soldiers died during the war. Although recent interest in memory and commemoration has made the British war cemeteries of the Great War a much-studied subject, the spatial dimension of this enormous undertaking remains somewhat out of focus. The geographical context, however, is an important factor in shaping the meanings for each cemetery. In each, the memory of the war intersects and interacts with the historical memory carried by the site. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cemeteries of the Palestine campaign, above all in Jerusalem. The paper follows the history of the design of war cemeteries of the Palestine campaign, and examines the ways the cemeteries and their design relate to their particular geographical context, and the impact this context may have on their interpretation

Afterwardsness in film

The spectatorial paradigm proposed here develops directly from the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, which developed out of Freud’s work on traumatic neuroses and the abandoned seduction theory. Afterwardsness, Laplanche’s reworking of Freud’s concept, and the cinema both share a concern with temporality. They also share a common interest in memory and are both bound to a particularly Laplanchean notion of translation. Film has always been thoroughly intertextual and has always sought to remake or (re)translate itself for differing generations and different nations. What I am suggesting in this essay is that spectators also remake films as part of the very process of spectatorship and that beyond the actual cinematic experience they carry a remade and remembered “film” with them. This view of spectatorship therefore takes afterwardsness as its motivating force. The experience of watching a film coincides also with the temporal directionalities described by Laplanche in relation to afterwardsness. Not only is the spectator left with memories from, and of, the film after it has ended, but any number of (frequently traumatic) enigmatic signifiers or messages may have been unconsciously recorded, requiring subsequent de‐ and re‐translation. Following a Laplanchian model, one might surmise that the cinematic spectator develops a cinematic unconscious on the basis of the “repression” of the messages received via the screen. This “repression” occurs as a result of the sheer volume and traumatic intensity of the visual and aural stimuli, which cannot be immediately ordered, understood, de‐ and re‐translated. These enigmatic messages, structured by the temporality of afterwardsness, provoke the spectator into a process of reconstruction, re‐translation. At the same time the visual and aural stimuli of the cinematic experience may also have an immediate effect on conscious perception or trigger the traumatic recollection of a previously unconscious trauma. Subjectivity in this context would thus be, as Laplanche asserts, a process of “auto‐translation”, provoked by the message of the other (see Laplanche 1992a). This other may well be partially or totally inflected by the hegemony of Hollywood; however, the de‐ and re‐translation that is part of the process of auto‐translation might enable an active “cinematographic performance” that may ultimately open up a critical space beyond the dominant discourses. (This notion of “cinematographic performance” is discussed in Guattari (1977).) These (traumatic) memories, enigmatic signifiers, the de‐translated remnants of one’s cinema history are re‐translated and remade, engendering a remaking of oneself around these fragments in a process of “auto‐translation”, what might also be thought of as a kind of re‐narration. There is an active, almost performative, dimension to this process of repetition in translation, in difference; an emphasis on re‐narration as part of a process of translation or re‐writing, a process of transformation. Thus it has been argued that: Afterwardsness is Laplanche’s term for the German Nachträglichkeit. “Deferred action” was James Strachey’s English translation, used in the Standard Edition. For a detailed discussion of the significance of translation for the concept see Sutton (2001). Forward movement in life is achieved through a backward movement in memory, but one that is more than a simple regression. In place of the blocked nostalgia or nausea of the perpetual return, the past is transformed in such processes as “working through” and “deferred action”. This is […] performance that is iterative and interrogative—a repetition that is initiatory, instating a differential history that will not return to the power of the Same. (Burgin 1996, p. 273) The idea of a Nachträglichkeit spectatorship is to express the very dynamism of the spectatorial experience, to speak of the reconstructive and creative aspect of spectatorship. This process of spectatorship recreates the films it “remembers” and articulates a certain kind of love at first sight (always already at second sight) of the cinema, the expression of a kind of après‐coup of the coup de foudre.

The Work of Memory and the Unfinished Past: Deepening and Widening the Social Study of Memory in Southeast Asia

The past few years have seen a remarkable development in the field of memory research. There has been a great burst of writing, crossing the boundaries between several disciplines, and offering a wealth of new insights into this complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. Advances in neurology have been so spectacular as to transform our knowledge about the brain and its biochemistry, providing for the first time a detailed and coherent picture of how memories are actually created and retrieved in the brain (Rose, 1992). Most of this knowledge is no more than fifteen or twenty years old. Schacter (1996:6) observes the possibility of a new synthesis aris ing with the increased co-operation between, as he terms it, the separate of cognitive psychologists, clinicians, and neuroscientists. Tellingly, he makes no mention of historians, sociologists, or anthropologists, tribes whose sphere of interest has been even more sharply separated from those who investigate memory in a laboratory context. But in these fields, too, there has been a sudden kindling of interest in memory within concrete social contexts. New works in psychology probe the role of memory in the formation of personal identity and life stories (Ross, 1991; Neisser & Fivush, 1994), while in the disciplines of history, anthropology and sociology, there has been a simultaneous development of interest in the workings of mem ory as a social phenomenon. For memory is as intrinsic to the construc tion of collective identities as it is integral to the individual's sense of self. The new outpouring of literature on all aspects of memory presents us with something of a puzzle: memories, after all, are nothing new. If memory is an indelible feature of social life, why only now should there be such a heightened awareness of its importance? And why should social scientists have found, on the whole, so little to say until recently about the functions of memory in social life? Perhaps memory was a fact of life too obvious to attract attention, so that it was simply taken for granted — in

Memoir at Saint-Brieuc

Memoir at Saint-Brieuc Raquel Scherr Salgado (bio) He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier. Walter Benjamin When a friend of mine, knowing I was fascinated with the subject of memory and death, suggested I read Le premier homme, I could not help but muse at the type of criticism that a woman of my generation and my ethnic background might be called to make if asked to comment on the work, let alone write about it. “Mmmm . . . there’s something annoying about the word “man” in the title, and, therefore, so the argument runs, about the European white man who wrote the book.” Argument ad hominem, indeed, much the way arguments go now-a-days, for all of us engaged in cultural critique, and feeling as if we must remain intellectually loyal to our various heritages. This is not a bad thing. My own interest in memory emerges from my desire to dig, like a deep sea crab, the murky waters of my mixed race heritage. I am a mutt. I am marginal. I have been teetering between “borders” long before the word meant that race, or modernity itself could “decenter” you. For the majority of the human race, living on the edges is nothing new and, for this reason, it has been intriguing [End Page 576] and seductive for the elites, academics and others, to explore “otherness,” and “marginality” and the off-centered perspectives that these can give us of the world’s cultural productions. But, in a very short time, these metacritical concepts have lost their vigor and become clichés. We need new models. My interest in death precedes my interest in memory. This is usually the case for everyone, I think. My father dead, my mother dead, my brother dead, my niece dead, my uncles and aunts dead, my friends dead, the sons and daughters of friends dead, too, force the “fan of memory,” of which Walter Benjamin speaks, to open wide as the chasm that welcomes the orphan that you’ve become. Without memory you are nobody, and memory comes hard. Strangely, this is where I find affinity with Camus and, especially, with his work Le premier homme. I say strangely because I might have said, instead, that he walked unsteady as a pied-noir (a Frenchman in Algiers, living a border culture, looked upon by the French as barbarian and unintellectual). And let us not forget that Camus was also of mixed blood, his father Alsatian, his mother from Mahon. Throughout history, the quickness of the blood has worked to make mutts of us all. We are not the first to cross borders. My interest in memory encouraged me to seek memoiristic writings long before the emergence of what writer Jill Johnston called the “plebeian” memoir so popular now, in no small part, because it speaks of the marginal. 1 Indeed, the phenomenon of its popularity comes at a time when my generation, the post WWII generation, sees itself cut up by cultural differences and at the mercy of the modern technologies with which it grew up. The memoir wants to be, in this postmodern moment, the vehicle of expression for those of us who find ourselves “decentered” and who imagine that by concentrating on our individual pasts we can perhaps reconstitute ourselves and escape the ahistoricism to which we feel condemned. The strategy is a good one, I think, but it misses the essence of a memoiristic writing that captures, like memory, the past and is, in its true form, precisely a narrative of the ahistorical and fragmented trying to find a form and moral center. Camus’s Le premier homme anticipates the condition of crisis our generation feels and provides, better than any works I...

What Public History Offers, and Why It Matters

In Public History and the Study of Memory,' David Glassberg offers an overview of the scholarship of memory as it pertains to the practice of history, with reflections on how history could itself contribute usefully to this scholarship. This exceptionally useful essay should help crystallize a very important moment in both scholarship and practice, with a sharpened interest in the rich potential of history the likely result. My general sense is that Glassberg is most effective in showing how the broad recent interest in memory can both propel and shape a widening scope for history research and practice, but he is more understated in suggesting the unique contribution history can make to an emerging memory scholarship. In this respect, the essay positions itself within the professional discourse of history, from its initial framing of the dialogue between academic and historians to its very useful reflections on promising directions for audience research out in the field. Its strengths are in considering those questions bearing most directly on what Glassberg calls public where history, tradition, memory, and the come together in more or

Implicit memory research in 1996: Introductory remarks.

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology is titled Memory Research in 1996. Implicit memory now occupies centre stage in the study of memory, and as such, the editor of the journal saw the need for a special issue. As guest editor of the special issue on implicit memory, I solicited research articles from eleven prominent laboratories. As you will see in reading the issue, the eleven papers report new and innovative research on a range of empirical and theoretical issues dealing with implicit memory.Because the study of implicit memory is still quite new, and the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology attracts readers with different research backgrounds, I am providing below a general introduction to implicit memory and to the eleven articles contained in the special issue.The way we think about memory has evolved rather dramatically in recent years. Check your dictionary for the term memory and you will likely find the traditional definition: Memory is the faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences, an act or instance of remembrance or recollection (The American Heritage Dictionary, 1985). Ask a cognitive psychologist to define memory and you will likely find that the traditional definition is no longer complete because of a recent distinction between explicit memory and implicit memory (Graf & Schacter, 1985).We now appreciate that memory for a past event or experience can be revealed in at least two fundamentally different ways. On the one hand, memory can be expressed through the conscious recollection or recalling of past events, which is now called explicit memory. On the other hand, memory for a past event or experience can be revealed through behaviour that does not entail conscious recollection of the event, which is referred to as implicit memory(f.1).Implicit memory encompasses many kinds of phenomena. In a review of the history and current status of implicit memory, Schacter (1987) describes many instances of implicit remembering that occur in both everyday and experimental situations. These include simple conditioning, savings during relearning, priming, and social behaviour, to mention only a few. Researchers are beginning to investigate many of these and other expressions of implicit memory, although the contemporary study of implicit memory focuses extensively on priming.Priming is the phenomenon of implicit memory whereby a previous encounter with a stimulus influences the speed or accuracy of performance on a task, a task that does not require conscious recollection of the prior encounter with the stimulus. The contemporary study of priming has focused on the phenomenon whereby a prior presentation of a stimulus, usually a word or picture, facilitates subsequent processing of that stimulus or a related stimulus. A prevalent illustration would be the identification of a perceptually - degraded or fragmented form of the stimulus. For instance, one popular priming task requires subjects to identify a stimulus flashed very briefly on a computer screen; this is referred to as perceptual identification or masked word identification. Another popular task requires subjects to complete a fragmented stimulus, as in word fragment completion ( - 1 - ph - t) or word stem completion (ele ____). In these priming tasks, a target item presented at study (elephant) is cued at test by its perceptually - cued form, so the beneficial effect of study on test performance has been labeled perceptual priming.Priming on perceptually - cued tests plays a major role in the study of implicit memory. Initial interest in memory began with reports that dense amnesic patients with severely impaired explicit memory show normal priming on word fragment completion tasks. Many further studies have shown that a variety of subject and experimental variables have a dissociative effect on implicit memory assessed by priming, and on explicit memory assessed by recall or recognition. …

Memory for action events: The power of enactment

Memory researchers have traditionally made use of verbal materials in their empirical studies. During the last decade or so, there has been a burgeoning interest in memory for other classes of materials — in particular, memory for action events. This report reviews briefly some of the research in this area. The emphasis is on the recall of series of instructions, such aslift the pen, put on the ring. The core finding in those studies is that enactment of the instructions during the study phase, either by the subject or by the experimenter, improves performance on a subsequent recall test. Some explanations for the mnemonic effect of enactment are examined, as also are subsidiary issues, such as population and individual differences in the recall of action events. Implications for education are discussed, including the possibility of a two-way interaction between enactment and cognition.

Baudelaire and the English Tradition by Patricia Clements

Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1985). x, 442. $33.50 (u.s.) Patricia Clements’s book is primarily an influence study in the old style, though it contains an implicit critique of Harold Bloom’s ideas. Her study analyzes the influence of Baudelaire on a number of English poets and critics from Swinburne to Eliot, and shows how Baudelaire’s ideas were used, often without acknowledgement, to attack English conventionality and philistinism in the arts. Swinburne was the first English critic — the first critic anywhere, in fact — to pay serious attention to Baudelaire as a poet rather than a cause célèbre. In his poems, criticism, fiction, and satires, Swinburne carried on an extended dialogue with the French poet, and in doing so argued, says Clements, “that the ‘brotherhood’ of poets is inter­ national; that poetry and imaginative prose have the right to deal with unorthodox or unusual psychological and sexual subject matter; that the language of criticism stands in need of revision” (25). He also argued courageously against l’hérésie de l’enseignement and maintained, with Baudelaire, that a work is justified only by its formal qualities. Clements often suggests through her diction that Swinburne was alone in his opinions : he “heralds” or “predicts” later developments, including much of Modern­ ism. In fact, he was the first to derive these ideas from his reading of Baudelaire, but Arnold, for example, had already argued for international standards of poetry and for the revival of criticism. Swinburne’s real origi­ nality lay in his appreciation of Baudelaire’s craftsmanship and his ability to understand Baudelaire’s hatred of nineteenth-century positivism and optimism. Noting Baudelaire’s “contempt of such facile free-thinking.” Swinburne suggested that the poet had sought “ a fiery refuge in the good old hell of the faithful from the watery new paradise of liberal theosophy and ultimate amiabiilty of all things” (70). This perceptive criticism is all the more remarkable in that it influenced Swinburne’s own poetry so little: his own sense of evil remains largely small-boy naughtiness or pathological masochism. By the time of Walter Pater’s major works, both Swinburne and Baude­ laire had been damned by Buchanan in his pamphlet on the “Fleshly School” of poetry, and Jowett had threatened to expose Pater’s homo­ sexuality if he did not restrain his aesthetic enthusiasms. The result was what Clements calls “ the reign of cunning in Pater’s work” (104) — a net­ work of allusion and allegory in Pater’s writing, the purpose of which was to conceal his debt to Baudelaire. This chapter, the most interesting in the book, is intriguing simply as detective work; the subterranean connections between Baudelaire and Pater are scrupulously and ingeniously traced, and we learn much about the sources of Pater’s ideas about modernity, abstrac225 tion. correspondances, and personality in art. Clements occasionally makes extravagant claims, as when she argues that the “mythic method” of Joyce and Eliot is anticipated by Pater’s far more general interest in memory and intellectual context. But on the whole her method serves her well here. The suppression of his sources saved Pater from the fate of Oscar Wilde, who courted publicity as assiduously as Pater shunned it. By this third chapter, Clements is in difficult territory, for English culture had become far more cosmopolitan by the 1880s, and it is not always easy to say whether a Baudelairean idea comes directly from Baudelaire, or through Swinburne and Pater, or more vaguely from the Zeitgeist. Baudelaire was now asso­ ciated with “decadence,” a notoriously difficult term to define, but one which often implies cultivation of the artificial. Baudelaire had damned nature as immoral and cruel, and maintained that everything good in man was artificial: “Tout ce qui est beau et noble est le résultat de la raison et du calcul.. . . Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d’un art” (154). This is another aspect of Baude­ laire’s rejection of meliorism, in this case the eighteenth-century worship of nature as an ethical norm; as such it was sane and necessary...