Working with Memory: an Introduction

Abstract

The contemporary academic fascination with memory exemplified by the essays collected in this volume is but one manifestation of a more general historical upswing - or what one writer has described as 'a..boom of unprecedented proportions' in memory's valuation. Buci-Glucksmann's challenge to Huyssen rests on a rebuttal of his account of modernity, which aligns the epoch too simplistically with reason and objectivity. The atrocities of two world wars lie between the nineteenth-century crisis of memory and the late twentieth-century 'memory boom'. The contemporary explosion of scholarly research concerning memory has emerged within the context of a more general cultural fascination with memor..