Media and Cultural Memory

While the study of antiquity and its reception has been an important subject of study for centuries, theoretical approaches to the ways in which reception operates in practice have proven difficult to establish. Classical works, images, and narratives have a long- and wide-ranging reception history and in tracing this history, scholarship has long emphasized that classical receptions shift over time. Given the enduring and, indeed, expanding popularity of the classics, more recent approaches have started to explore those complex receptions as matters of mnemohistory, or cultural histories of memory. Memories of Antiquity builds on this view of classical reception as a mnemohistory by collecting a set of global and transcultural examples in which the study of classical reception is usefully conceptualised through the lens of memory. The collection is fundamentally interdisciplinary, featuring investigations of literature, pop art, photography, film, and even an actual play podcast. The broad scope of the volume creates a multitude of comparative points on how ancient stories and myths are reframed and remembered in different contexts, opening a dialogue for further inquiries into this rich and complex area of research.

This book examines how women authors recall their own and their families’ past lives after having emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and how they reflect on their new country of residence, be it Germany, Austria, Israel, USA, or Finland, among others. The chapters connect migration, memory, and gender studies to analyse literary presentations created by these "travelling" women.

The aim of the book is to pay attention both to women’s contribution to cultural transfer, and to the mobility of memories: for the first time, it brings women’s narratives as a form and tool to work through both individual and collective traumas to the forefront, remedying a long-standing omission in Russian and post-Soviet migration history. At the same time, the volume looks at "travelling" memories and cultural traumas from a gendered perspective: what happens when the recollections of women’s traumatic experiences of Soviet history travel through time and space?

As this volume argues, narratives by women who left the Soviet Union often call into question official accounts of Soviet history, and rewrite them in a way that makes room for gendered lived experience.

This book deals with mnemonic migration understood as the movement of memories across linguistic, cultural and mnemonic borders via the medium of literature. In contemporary literature, there is a growing number of authors with migration experience, some of whom write not in native tongue, but in their second or third language and who represent their experience of migration as encounter of different historical memories. When migrating to a new place, people enter not only a new political and cultural structure, but also a new framework of memory. They need to adjust their historical imaginaries, thereby also contesting and expanding the framework they enter. The volume explores how contemporary literature addresses specific historical legacies, juxtaposes them multidirectionally and disseminates them in original and through translation in different parts of the world and in various social contexts. Furthermore, this volume traces literature’s role in the processes of memory circulation, translation and reception from the interdisciplinary perspectives of cultural memory studies, translation studies, reception studies and the studies of migrant and multilingual literature.

The British Bangladeshi diaspora is located at a complex intersection in postcolonial Britain. It not only embodies the unfolding legacy of the erstwhile colonial empire but is also a critical site of contemporary debates around race, religion, and nation. Using an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining key concepts from memory studies, diaspora studies, and arts-based methodologies, this book locates how ‘hidden’ histories of colonialism, Partition, migration, and settlement, are implicated in the community's negotiations of the meanings of being British, Bangladeshi, and Muslim. Mapping key shifts in the temporal and spatial locations of three generations of British Bangladeshis through a diasporic memory ecologies framework, the book analyses how multidirectional anti-colonial and anti-racist memories are gradually forgotten as young British Bangladeshis increasingly mobilise a pan-Islamic identity framework to resist racialisation and alienation. Importantly, through varied case studies, it locates how reanimating mnemonic linkages across these intergenerational ecologies through creative memory work can help understand and negotiate the present-day realities of the postcolonial migrant condition in the UK.

Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization provides an accessible overview of cultural memory studies, a field substantially shaped by Ann Rigney. In more than sixty short chapters, leading and emerging scholars in the field present key concepts for the study of cultural memory – from ‘divided narratives’ to ‘the platformization of memory’ and ‘the memory of activism’. The volume includes voices from literary studies, media studies, history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology.

Eight sections discuss innovations in the major research areas of cultural memory studies today: 1. History, Narrative, Literature; 2. The Dynamics of Memory; 3. Mediation and Remediation; 4. Lives and Afterlives of Texts; 5. National and Transnational Memory; 6. The Matter of Memory; 7. The Agency of the Aesthetic; 8. The Memory-Activism Nexus.

This new handbook will be an indispensable resource for cultural memory research across disciplines, opening up this exciting field to interested students and advanced academics alike.

Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies.

"Honourable Mention" in the "Best First Book" Award of the Memory Studies Association (2025)

This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how, in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future: that of the historically aware human rights advocate. More than an ethical practice, engaging with the Holocaust is used as a means of asserting one’s standing on "the right side of history"; the memorialisation of the Holocaust has thus become a means of governmentality, a way of governing contemporary citizen-subjects. The linking of public memory of the Holocaust with the human rights project is often presented as highly beneficial for all members of what is often called the "global community". Yet this book argues that this specific constellation of memory also has the ability to function as an exercise of power, and thus runs the risk of reinforcing structural oppression. With its novel theoretical approach this book not only contributes to Memory Studies but also connects Holocaust memory to Studies of Global Governmentality and the debate on decolonising memory politics.

Scholarship often presumes that texts written about the Shoah, either by those directly involved in it or those writing its history, must always bear witness to the affective aftermath of the event, the lingering emotional effects of suffering. Drawing on the History of Emotions and on trauma theory, this monograph offers a critical study of the ambivalent attributions and expressions of emotion and “emotionlessness” in the literature and historiography of the Shoah. It addresses three phenomena: the metaphorical discourses by which emotionality and the purported lack thereof are attributed to victims and to perpetrators; the rhetoric of affective self-control and of affective distancing in fiction, testimony and historiography; and the poetics of empathy and the status of emotionality in discourses on the Shoah. Through a close analysis of a broad corpus centred around the work of W. G. Sebald, Dieter Schlesak, Ruth Klüger and Raul Hilberg, the book critically contextualises emotionality and its attributions in the post-war era, when a scepticism of pathos coincided with demands for factual rigidity. Ultimately, it invites the reader to reflect on their own affective stances towards history and its commemoration in the twenty-first century.

This book analyzes the impact of abusive regimes of power on women’s lives and on their self-expression through close readings of life writing by women in communist Romania. In particular, it examines the forms of agency and privacy available to women under totalitarianism and the modes of relationships in which their lives were embedded. The self-expression and self-reflexive processes that are to be found in the body of Romanian women’s autobiographical writings this study presents create complex private narratives that underpin the creative development of inclusive memories of the past through shared responsibility and shared agency. At the same time, however, the way these private, personal narratives intertwined with collective and official historical narratives exemplifies the multidimensional nature of privacy as well as the radical redefinition of agency in this period. This book argues for a broader understanding of the narratives of the communist past, one that reflects the complexity of individual and social interactions and allows a deep exploration of the interconnected relations between memory, trauma, nostalgia, agency, and privacy.

This volume contends that young individuals across Europe relate to their country’s history in complex and often ambivalent ways. It pays attention to how both formal education and broader culture communicate ideas about the past, and how young people respond to these ideas. The studies collected in this volume show that such ideas about the past are central to the formation of the group identities of nations, social movements, or religious groups. Young people express received historical narratives in new, potentially subversive, ways. As young people tend to be more mobile and ready to interrogate their own roots than later generations, they selectively privilege certain aspects of their identities and their identification with their family or nation while neglecting others. This collection aims to correct the popular misperception that young people are indifferent towards history and prove instead that historical narratives are constitutive to their individual identities and their sense of belonging to something broader than themselves.

By analyzing appropriations of literary modernism in video, experimental film, and installation art, this study investigates works of media art as agents of cultural memory. While research recognizes film and literature as media of memory, it often overlooks media art. Adaptation studies, art history, and hermeneutics help understand ‘appropriation’ in art in terms of a dialog between an artwork, a text, and their contexts. The Russian Formalist notion of estrangement, together with new concepts from literary, film, and media studies, offers a new perspective on ‘appropriation’ that illuminates the sensuous dimension of cultural memory . Media artworks make memory palpable: they address the collective body memory of their viewers, prompting them to reflect on the past and embody new ways of remembering. Five contextual close-readings analyze artworks by Janis Crystal Lipzin, William Kentridge, Mark Aerial Waller, Paweł Wojtasik, and Tom Kalin. They appropriate modernist texts by Gertrude Stein, Italo Svevo, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil. This book will be of value to readers interested in cultural memory, sensory studies, literary modernism, adaptation studies, and art history.

Memory loss is not always viewed purely as a contingent neurobiological process present in an ageing population; rather, it is frequently related to larger societal issues and political debates. This edited volume examines how different media and genres – novels, auto/biographical writings, documentary as well as fictional films and graphic memoirs – represent dementia for the sake of critical explorations of memory, trauma and contested truths. In ten analytical chapters and one piece of graphic art, the contributors examine the ways in which what might seem to be the individual, ahistorical diseases of dementia are used in contemporary cultural texts to represent and respond to violent historical and political events – ranging from the Holocaust to postcolonial conditions – all of which can prove difficult to remember. Combining approaches from literary studies with insights from memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, the critical medical humanities and media, film and comics studies, this volume explores the politics of dementia and incites new debates on cultures of remembrance, while remaining attentive to the lived reality of dementia.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

This book takes an innovative approach to the study of memories of transit and exile in Portugal between 1933 and 1945 in artistic media. Informed by contemporary debates within memory and translation studies, it develops a translational perspective on transcultural memory and explores its ethical implications. This study provides an in-depth analysis of Daniel Blaufuks’s inter-art project Sob Céus Estranhos, Domingos Amaral’s novel Enquanto Salazar Dormia and João Canijo’s documentary Fantasia Lusitana. It examines the heterocultural networks of signification that these artistic media mobilize to implicate the presence of World War II refugees in Portugal in contemporary negotiations of communality. By approaching memory through a translational lens on culture, this book also offers new perspectives on remediation, memory transfer and the ethical dimensions of remembrance in the context of transcultural memory and migration.

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.

Responding to a lack of studies on the film festival’s role in the production of cultural memory, this book explores different parameters through which film festivals shape our reception and memories of films. By focusing on two Asian American film festivals, this book analyzes the frames of memory that festivals create for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media. It further establishes that festival locations—both cities and screening venues—play a significant role in shaping our experience of films. Finally, it shows that festivals produce performances which help guide audiences towards certain readings and direct the film’s role as a memory object. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies, 'Asian American Film Festivals' offers a mixed-methods approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of frames, locations, and performances shaping the festival’s memory practices. It also draws attention to the understudied genre of Asian American film festivals, showing how these festivals actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group’s collective identity and memory.

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant ‘archives’ that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material – from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films – and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical “history of the oppressed” as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

The Second World War is omnipresent in contemporary memory debates. As the war fades from living memory, this study is the first to systematically analyze how Second World War museums allow prototypical visitors to comprehend and experience the past. It analyzes twelve permanent exhibitions in Europe and North America – including the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the House of European History in Brussels, the Imperial War Museums in London and Manchester, and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans – in order to show how museums reflect and shape cultural memory, as well as their cognitive, ethical, emotional, and aesthetic potential and effects. This includes a discussion of representations of events such as the Holocaust and air warfare. In relation to narrative, memory, and experience, the study develops the concept of experientiality (on a sliding scale between mimetic and structural forms), which provides a new textual-spatial method for reading exhibitions and understanding the experiences of historical individuals and collectives. It is supplemented by concepts like transnational memory, empathy, and encouraging critical thinking through difficult knowledge.

Due to the large-scale global transformations of the 20th century, migration literature has become a vibrant genre over the last decades. In these novels, issues of transcultural identity and belonging naturally feature prominently. This study takes a closer look at the ways in which the idea of family informs processes of identity construction. It explores changing roles and meanings of the diasporic family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting in order to identify the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in this context. This book builds on insights from different fields of family research (e.g. sociology, psychology, communication studies, memory studies) to provide a conceptual framework for the investigation of synchronic and diachronic family constellations and connections. The approach developed in this study not only sheds new light on contemporary British migration literature but can also prove fruitful for analyses of families in literature more generally. By highlighting the relevance and multifaceted nature of doing family, this study also offers new perspectives for transcultural memory studies.

The world wars, genocides and extremist ideologies of the 20th century are remembered very differently across Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, resulting sometimes in fierce memory disputes. This book investigates the complexity and contention of the layers of memory of the troubled 20th century in the region. Written by an international group of scholars from a diversity of disciplines, the chapters approach memory disputes in methodologically innovative ways, studying representations and negotiations of disputed pasts in different media, including monuments, museum exhibitions, individual and political discourse and electronic social media. Analyzing memory disputes in various local, national and transnational contexts, the chapters demonstrate the political power and social impact of painful and disputed memories. The book brings new insights into current memory disputes in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It contributes to the understanding of processes of memory transmission and negotiation across borders and cultures in Europe, emphasizing the interconnectedness of memory with emotions, mediation and politics.

The impact of digital global media, geopolitical changes and migration demands new theorizations within memory studies. Despite the growing field of media memory studies, the impact from film and media studies has been scarce within memory studies. This unique study offers new theorizations of three crucial concepts for media memory studies: remediation, transculturality and the archive.
This book takes a closer look at the media specificity of archival footage and how it is adapted, translated and appropriated. In its original approach this work reflects upon the role of documentary film images for the construction of memory. By merging film and media studies with memory studies the work offers multiple theoretical and methodological approaches for everyone interested in the heritage of audiovisual media: film and media scholars, memory scholars, historians, art historians, social scientists, librarians or archivists, curators and festival programmers alike.

Memory in the Balkans has often been described as binding, authoritative, and non-negotiable, functioning as a banner of war. This book challenges such a one-dimensional representation and offers a more nuanced analysis that accommodates frequently ignored instances of transnational solidarity, dialogue, communal mourning and working through a difficult past. Exploring a broad range of memorial practices, the book focuses on the ways in which cultural memory is mediated, performed and critically reworked by literature and the arts in the former Yugoslavia. Against the methodological nationalism of works that study Serbian, Croatian, or Bosniak culture as self-contained, this book examines post-Yugoslav literature, film, visual culture, and politicized art practices from a supranational angle. Not solely focusing on traumatic memories, but also exploring how post-Yugoslav cultural practices mobilize memory for a politics of hope, this volume moves beyond the trauma paradigm that still dominates memory studies. In its scope and approach, the book shows the relevance of the cultural memory of Eastern European citizens and the contribution they can offer to the building of Europe’s shared cultural memory and transnational identity.

In a business world predominantly oriented toward the future, it has paradoxically become ever more common that companies turn towards their pasts. This book empirically explores the phenomenon of organizational remembrance from a holistic cultural perspective. Based on a twelve-month ethnographic case study conducted at the headquarters of the German automobile company, AUDI AG, this study dissects the relationships between memory, identity, and image in a corporate setting. The greater aim in doing so is twofold: First, this study examines exactly why and how a company officially manages its past in terms of ‘history’ and ‘tradition.’ And second, this study scrutinizes what effect organizational remembrance has on the workforce – how it impacts their collective identification with a corporate community and influences their understanding of their daily working life. By investigating the interplay between different stakeholder groups, as well as their practices, media, mental models, and other vehicles of remembrance, an integrated account is offered which makes sense of the complex cultural forces at work in the corporate handling of the past, the present, and the future.

This book places transcultural memory in the South Asian cultural and literary context. Divided into two parts, the book first defines transcultural memory in the age of globalised modernity both as a theory and social practice. Then it examines contemporary Indo-English novels from India and Pakistan with the theoretical and methodological tool of transcultural memory to shed new light on the connection between memory and modernity, and memory and South Asian cultures in the wake of new social and political transformations on the Indian subcontinent. A special focus on commemorative tropes in the novels not only show the possibility of a dialogue with different versions of the past, but also how such a dialogue shapes processes of remembrance between and beyond borders. Hence, the books comes up with alternative ways of reading the Indo-English novels, divesting the concept of (trans)cultural memory from its Euro- centrism and claiming it as equally significant in comprehending the new configurations of memory and modernity in non-Western locations.

How do memories circulate transnationally and to what effect? How to understand the enduring role of national memories and their simultaneous reconfiguration under globalization? Challenging the methodological nationalism that has until recently dominated the study of memory and heritage, this book charts the rich production of memory across and beyond national borders. Arguing for the fruitfulness of a transnational as distinct from a global approach, it places the issues of circulation, articulation and the scales of remembrance at the centre of its inquiry. In the process, it sheds new light on the ways in which mediation, post-coloniality, migration and regional integration affect both the way we remember and the role of memory in contemporary societies.

In this interdisciplinary collection, humanities and social science scholars examine a rich sample of cases from the nineteenth century on, stretching across the globe from Vietnam to Europe and the Middle East, to the USA and the Pacific, and involving a wide range of cultural practices from quilting to films, from photography to heritage sites and monuments. In the process, the volume develops a new theoretical framework while proposing new methodological tools and resources for studying collective remembrance beyond the nation-state.

The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.

Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History offers a series of essays on small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II, and it does so through considering these “miniature monuments‎” (of, among others, Frankfurt, Munich, Schwetzingen, Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Three-dimensional renderings in diminutive size have rarely been subjected to rigorous theoretical reflection. Conventionally, models, whether of ruins or intact spaces, have been assumed to be “easily legible”; that is, they have been assumed to be vehicles of the authentic. Yet rubble and other models should be theorized as complex simulacra of abstract realities and catalysts of memories. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a haunting paradox: building ruins. The book elucidates how utterly contingent processes of crumbling and collapse (the English words for the Latin ruina) came to command such great interest in modern Europe that tremendous efforts were taken to uncover, render, and, most of all, recreate ruins.

This book aims at building a bridge between the social and political aspects of remembering and the cognitive and discourse processes driving such activities. By analyzing these cognitive and discursive processes, Bietti explores practices of individual and collective remembering in institutional and private settings in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina. This books begins to fill the conceptual gap between cognitive oriented approaches to remembering that draw conclusions about how memory functions in the mind without a detailed discourse analysis of the communicative interaction in which this process unfolds, and the discourse and pragmatic oriented approaches that are mainly interested in analyzing the rhetorical features of conversational remembering, in some cases disregarding that there are underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive the construction of discourses about past experiences. The empirical analysis shows that individual and collective remembering in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina vary in pragmatic ways due to the fact that these accounts of the past were constructed with reference to the communicative situation. Thus, this book also aims at shedding new light on the current practices of commemoration and remembrance related to periods of political violence in Argentina, in public and private settings.

This edited collection makes a progressive intervention into the interdisciplinary field of memory studies with a series of essays drawn from diverse theoretical, practitional and cultural backgrounds. The most seminal critical development within memory studies in recent years has arguably been the turn towards transculturalism. This movement engenders a series of methodologies that posit remembrance as a fluid process
in which commemorative tropes work to inform the representation of diverse events and traumas beyond national or cultural boundaries, transcending – but not negating – spatial, temporal and ideational differences.

Examining a wide range of historical and cultural contexts, the essays in this collection focus on the dialogues that shape processes of remembrance between and beyond borders, critiquing the problems and possibilities inherent in current discourses in memorial practice and theory as they approach the challenge of transculturalism.

The concept of Heimat with its seemingly pre- or anti-modern connotations of rootedness in a place of origin is central to a critical understanding of German history and culture. Over the course of the past fifteen years, scholars across a range of disciplines have found new ways to examine the changing notions of Heimat – its multifaceted cultural, literary, and visual history, its gendered connotations, and its national and ideological appropriations.
This anthology is the first to examine cultural manifestations of Heimat by giving special consideration to issues of memory and space. The contributions to this volume challenge static notions of place often associated with Heimat. Instead, they explore the social and cultural production of places of belonging as they emerge in literary and visual narratives ranging from 1800 to 2000 and beyond.
Although the anthology includes historical perspectives on Heimat, its overall objective is not to trace its cultural or literary history, but to place this complex term into new conceptual contexts. Drawing attention to manifestations of Heimat within German literary and cultural studies provides a rich ground for exploring the transformation of locality in trans/national contexts.

Nineteenth-century outlaw Ned Kelly is perhaps Australia's most famous historical figure. Ever since he went on the run in 1878 his story has been repeated time and again, in every conceivable medium. Although the value of his memory has been hotly contested – and arguably because of this – he remains perhaps the main national icon of Australia.

Kelly's flamboyant crimes turned him into a popular hero for many Australians during his lifetime and far beyond: a symbol of freedom, anti authoritarianism, anti imperialism; a Robin Hood, a Jesse James, a Che Guevara. Others have portrayed him as a villain, a gangster, a terrorist. His latest incarnation has been as WikiLeaks founder and fellow Australian "cyber outlaw" Julian Assange. Despite the huge number of representations of Kelly – from rampant newspaper reporting of the events, to the iconic Sidney Nolan paintings, to a movie starring Mick Jagger, to contemporary urban street art – this is the first work to take this corpus of material itself as a subject of analysis.

The fascinating case of this young outlaw provides an important opportunity to further our understanding of the dynamics of cultural memory. The book explains the processes by which the cultural memory of Ned Kelly was made and has developed over time, and how it has related to formations and negotiations of national identity. It breaks new ground in memory studies in the first place by showing that cultural memories are formed and develop through tangles of relations, what Basu terms memory dispositifs. In introducing the concept of the memory dispositif, this volume brings together and develops the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben on the dispositif, along with relevant concepts from the field of memory studies such as allochronism, colonial aphasia, and multidirectionality, the memory site – especially as developed by Ann Rigney – and Jan Assmann's figure of memory.

Secondly, this work makes important headway in our understanding of the relationships between cultural memory and national identity, at a time when matters of identity appear to be more urgent and fraught than ever. In doing so, it shows that national identities are never purely national but are always sub- and transnational. The Ned Kelly memory dispositif has made complex and conflicting contributions to constructions of national identity. Ever since his outlawry, the identities invested in Kelly and those invested in the Australian nation have, in a two-way dynamic, fused into and strengthened each other, so that Kelly is in many ways a symbol for the national identity. Kelly has come to stand for an anti-establishment, working class, subaltern, Irish-inflected national identity. At the same time he has come to represent and enforce the whiteness, hyper-heterosexual masculinity and violence of "Australianness". Basu shows that Kelly has therefore always functioned in both radical and conservative ways, often both at once: a turbulent, Janus-faced figure.

Die Studie analysiert die Funktion des Hörspiels als kulturelles Gedächtnismedium anhand der Erinnerungen an den Holocaust im Rundfunk der DDR. Im Vergleich zur bereits vielfach untersuchten Darstellung des Holocaust in anderen Medien werden erstmals die spezifischen ästhetischen Mittel des Hörspiels und die Rolle des Rundfunks als politisches Machtinstrument in der deutsch-deutschen Auseinandersetzung fokussiert. Auszüge aus den analysierten Hörspielen finden sich statt auf der vormalig beigegebenen Audio-CD nun unter der Rubrik „Zusatzmaterial” auf dieser Webpage als passwortgeschützte zip-Datei. Das Passwort wird auf S. 356 des Buchs bzw. E-Books genannt.

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world’s fairs as transnational sites of memory.

This collection of essays brings together two major new developments in cultural memory studies: firstly, the shift away from static models of cultural memory, where the emphasis lies on cultural products, in the direction of more dynamic models where the emphasis lies instead on the cultural and social processes involved in the ongoing production of shared views of the past; and secondly, the growing interest in the role of the media, and their role beyond that of mere storage, within these dynamics.
The specific concern of this collection is linking the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus rests in particular on two aspects of media use: the basic dynamics of “mediation” and “remediation”. The key questions are: What role do media play in the production and circulation of cultural memories? How do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can new, emergent media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered?
The essays of this collection focus on social, historical, religious, and artistic media-memories. The authors analyze the memory-making impact of news media, the mediation and remediation of lieux de mémoire, the medial representation of colonial and postcolonial, of Holocaust and Second World War memories, and finally the problematization of these very processes in artistic media forms, such as novels and movies.

Medien werden erst durch bestimmte Formen des sozialen Gebrauchs zu „Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses“. Auch das Phänomen eines „Erinnerungsfilms“ (wie z.B. Das Leben der Anderen, Hotel Ruanda, On connaît la chanson) entsteht erst im plurimedialen Zusammenhang, durch seine Einbettung in ein komplexes mediensystemisches Netzwerk, das ihn durch verschiedene Formen der Bezugnahme zu einem solchen macht. Die im Band konturierte erinnerungskulturwissenschaftliche Filmanalyse macht diese Konstellationen in ihrem Funktionieren sichtbar.

1909 in den USA und 1912 in Deutschland gab es die ersten Biographien über Autorfiguren im Kino zu sehen. Die literarhistorische Filmbiographik hat seither eine reiche Tradition ausgeprägt, die in dieser Studie erstmals in Längs- und Querschnitten untersucht wird. So genannte „Dichterfilme“ entwerfen nicht nur variable Konzepte moderner Autorschaft, sondern sie schreiben auch an einer populären und intermedial narrativierten Literaturgeschichte mit. Autorschaft erweist sich dabei als Effekt filmischen Erzählens in der ökonomischen Wertschöpfungskette. Indem diese Spielfilme in hohem Maße an den Genres des Erzählkinos partizipieren und dessen Erzählmuster aufgreifen, leisten sie einen von der Forschung bisher kaum gewürdigten Beitrag zur Tradierung und Aktualisierung des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Aufgrund ihrer narrativen Konzeption präsentieren sie literarische Texte dabei immer wieder aufs Neue als Produkte biographischer Entelechie. Auf diese Weise affirmieren sie die Narrative der psychosozialen Devianz im biographischen Spielfilm (Genie und Wahnsinn, Sucht, Homosexualität, Depression etc.) und gleichermaßen den im populären Literaturbetrieb stark etablierten autobiographischen Zugang zu literarischen Texten. Ein Filmverzeichnis gibt Auskunft über 180 literarhistorische Spielfilme des westeuropäischen und US-amerikanischen Kanons.

Mit dem Thema „Körpergedächtnis“ wird ein Problem in den Blick genommen, das für die abendländische Kultur zentral ist: die Beziehung von Körper und Geist. Denn das Gedächtnis wird seit jeher an der Schnittstelle physiologischer und mentaler Prozesse angesiedelt. Die Autorinnen und Autoren des Bandes fokussieren den Körper als Medium des Gedächtnisses unter zwei Gesichtspunkten: Sie fragen einerseits nach den Institutionen und Praktiken der Zurichtung des Menschen und damit (im Anschluss an Nietzsche) nach der gewaltsamen Einübung eines körperlichen Gedächtnisses; der Körper erscheint hier als kulturelles Gedächtnis sozialer Disziplinierung. Andererseits thematisieren sie den kranken und/oder leidenschaftlichen Körper (mit Freud und Warburg) als affektives Gedächtnis eines Anderen der Kultur, d.h. als Artikulationsmedium des im Zivilisationsprozess Unterdrückten und Ausgegrenzten. Übung und Affekt, die beiden Leitbegriffe des Bandes, gehören dabei eng zusammen: Im selben historischen Prozess, in dem sich die als körperlich-seelische Einheit verstandene Übung zur rein körperlich-mechanischen Disziplinierung verengt, erscheinen die Leidenschaften als Symptom jener verlorenen Einheit, die gleichwohl von Anfang an eine bloß imaginäre war.

Das Themenfeld „Kulturelles Gedächtnis“ bzw. „Erinnerungskulturen“ boomt in den Kulturwissenschaften. Obwohl der enge Zusammenhang zwischen Medien und gesellschaftlichen Erinnerungsprozessen stets betont wird, bleiben bisherige Konzepte hier oft vage, und insbesondere die Forschung zu gesellschaftlicher Erinnerung in Zeiten moderner Medientechnologien steht noch am Anfang.

Der Band setzt an dieser Diagnose an und rückt den Zusammenhang von Medien, Kultur und gesellschaftlicher Erinnerung in der Gegenwart in den Mittelpunkt eines neuen Theorieangebots. Aufbauend auf einer Systematisierung und Kritik bisheriger Entwürfe wird eine medienkulturwissenschaftliche Terminologie und Modellierung von Gedächtnis und Erinnerung vorgeschlagen, die an den bisherigen Diskurs anschließt und zugleich durch eine Integration kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Überlegungen neue Perspektiven eröffnet.

Was macht Mythen für Erinnerungskulturen attraktiv? Wie lässt sich ‚das Mythische‘ und dessen Anpassungsfähigkeit als Erfolgskonzept beschreiben? Mythosaktualisierungen betreffen nicht nur mythische Inhalte, sondern auch ganz wesentlich die Medien mythisierenden Erinnerns sowie den Status dieses Erinnerungsmodus – z.B. im Verhältnis zu Geschichte oder individueller Erfahrung. Mythen existieren nicht an sich und können auch nicht in einer wie auch immer zu denkenden ‚Reinform‘ erinnert werden. Sie sind nicht nur Objekte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, sondern als spezifische Verfahren der Erinnerung mit ihrer medialen Erscheinungsweise derart verschmolzen, dass Tradierung und Generierung performativ im Erinnerungsvollzug ineinander greifen. Dieses Simultan von Weitergabe und Stiftung von Erinnerung zeigt der vorliegende Band aus literatur- und medienwissenschaftlicher, kommunikationswissenschaftlicher, politologischer und geschichtswissenschaftlicher Perspektive auf. Dabei geht es programmatisch nicht nur um Mythen, deren Ursprung in der Antike liegt, sondern auch um solche rezenterer Entstehungskontexte – um auf diese Weise zu vermeiden, Mythosaktualisierungen auf eine rein inhaltliche Ebene zu reduzieren und eine bis heute produktive Erinnerungsform auf einen exklusiven Entstehungszeitraum ‚echter Mythen‘ zu verweisen.

Der vielschichtige Zusammenhang zwischen Erinnerung, Identität und Narration ist im aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Diskurs ebenso allgegenwärtig wie in der zeitgenössischen Erzählliteratur. Ziel der Studie ist es, die bislang nur vage konturierte Begriffstrias systematisch zu erfassen und für die literaturwissenschaftliche Gedächtnisforschung fruchtbar zu machen. Durch eine Verknüpfung von Gedächtnistheorien, Erzähltheorie und Funktionsgeschichte wird erstmals eine Typologie der Gattung der Fictions of Memory entworfen, die das Spektrum literarischer Erinnerungs- und Identitätskonstruktionen beschreibbar macht. Am Beispiel zeitgenössischer kanadischer Romane (u.a. von Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler und Jane Urquhart) wird diese Bandbreite eindrucksvoll dokumentiert und gezeigt, dass und wie Fictions of Memory einen eigenständigen Beitrag zur Konstitution und Reflexion von Gedächtnis leisten.

In diesem Band werden literaturwissenschaftliche Gedächtniskonzepte erstmals systematisch erfasst und unter wissenschaftsgeschichtlichem, theoretischem und methodischem Gesichtspunkt dargestellt. Das Spektrum der vorgestellten Zugänge zum Zusammenhang von Literatur und Gedächtnis reicht von klassischen literaturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen (Metaphernforschung, Topik-Forschung, Intertextualitätstheorien, Gattung und Gedächtnis, Kanonforschung) über narratologische und mediologische Konzepte - wie 'Mimesis', 'Zeit', 'Medialität' und 'Intermedialität' - bis hin zu innovativen interdisziplinären Synthesen von literaturwissenschaftlicher Gedächtnisforschung und den Gedächtniskonzepten der Kulturwissenschaften, der Kognitionspsychologie, Systemtheorie und Geschlechterforschung. Die Beiträgerinnen und Beiträger leisten damit einen genuin diszplinären Beitrag zu der disziplinübergreifend geführten Diskussion um Gedächtnis und Erinnerung, rücken Literatur als konstitutiven Bestandteil der kulturellen Erinnerungspraxis in den Blick und zeigen wichtige Anknüpfungspunkte für einen kulturwissenschaftlichen Dialog auf.

Pluspunkte:

• Wegweisender Sammelband zu Gedächtnistheorien und -konzepten in der Literaturwissenschaft
• Knüpft an das in allen Kulturwissenschaften derzeit intensiv diskutierte Paradigma "Kulturelles Gedächtnis" an
• Mit Beiträgen international renommierter Gedächtnisforscher
• Wertvolle Fortsetzung der neuen Reihe "Media & Cultural Memory"

'Medien' und 'kollektives Gedächtnis' sind heute Kulturthemen ersten Ranges. Ziel des Bandes ist eine innovative Zusammenführung von Medientheorie und Gedächtnistheorie. In interdisziplinär und kulturwissenschaftlich ausgerichteten Beiträgen erfährt der bislang nur vage konturierte Begriff des Gedächtnismediums eine terminologische Präzisierung. Vertreter der Literatur-, Geschichts-, Politik-, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft sowie der Psychologie zeigen theoretische Konzeptionen sowie ein breites Spektrum konkreter Forschungsperspektiven zum Themenbereich 'Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses' auf. Der Band gewährt einen Überblick über verschiedene Ausprägungen, gesellschaftliche Funktionen, kulturelle Unterschiede und die historische Entwicklung der Gedächtnismedien vom 17. Jh. bis zur Gegenwart.