The Art of Forgetting
Series: Materializing Culture
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Oxford
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9781859732915
Subjects: Memory
Description: In tracing the process through which monuments give rise to collective memories, this path-breaking book emphasizes that memorials are not just inert and amnesiac spaces upon which individuals may graft their ever-shifting memories. To the contrary, the materiality of monuments can be seen to elicit a particular collective mode of remembering which shapes the consumption of the past as a shared cultural form of memory. In a variety of disciplines over the past decade, attention has moved away from the oral tradition of memory to the interplay between social remembering and object worlds. But research is very sketchy in this area and the materiality of monuments has tended to be ignored within anthropological literature, compared to the amount of attention given to commemorative practice. Art and architectural history, on the other hand, have been much interested in memorial representation through objects, but have paid scant attention to issues of social memory. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary in scope, this book fills this gap and addresses topics ranging from material objects to physical space; from the contemporary to the historical; and from ‘high art’ to memorials outside the category of art altogether. In so doing, it represents a significant contribution to an emerging field.
Table of contents: title: Illustrations; title: Contributors; title: Preface: David Lowenthal; title: Introduction: Adrian Forty; title: Ephemeral Monuments, Memory and Royal Sempiternity in a Grassfields Kingdom: Nicolas Argenti; title: The Place of Memory: Susanne Küchler; title: Girodet's "Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies:" In Remembrance of 'Things Sublime': Helen Weston; title: Bribing the Vote of Fame: Eighteenth Century Monuments and the Futility of Commemoration: David Bindman; title: Forgetting Rome and the Voice of Piranesi's 'Speaking Ruins': Tarnya Cooper; title: Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials: Michael Rowlands; title: Remembering and Forgetting in the Public Memorials of the Great War: Alex King; title: Commemorating 1916, Celebrating Difference: Parading and Painting in Belfast: Neil Jarman; title: Bibliography; title: Index