Memory, Temporality, Modernity: Les lieux de mémoire

TitleMemory, Temporality, Modernity: Les lieux de mémoire
Publication TypeBook Chapter
Year of PublicationSubmitted
AuthorsBill Schwarz, Susannah Radstone, Bill Schwarz,
Pagination41-58
PublisherFordham University Press
CityNew York
Notes

'\nMy aim, here, is a deal more modest: simply to plot the ways in which the problem of temporal dislocation - and of its synecdoche, memory - have been worked through in three historical accounts of modernity. In doing so, I draw attention to the contrary elements that occur in these histories. On the one hand, in each, history appears as \"the sign of the modern,\" and the impres of a sequential teleology is evident; on the other, interwoven into each account is a sense also of emotional or psychic loss, in whcih attachments to the past can no longer be sustained. I\'ll look briefly at J.H. Plumb and Carl Schorske, neither of whom is generally cited in the field of memory studies, and in more detail at Pierre Nora, whose work on memory is well known. These are historians, as readers who know their work will appreciate, of radically different temperaments. However, their varied intentions and politics notwithstanding, there occur unexpected formal affinities in the means by which they imagine the relations between past and present. We confront in each, respectively, the end of the past, the end of history, and the end of memory. Where does such interpretation leave us? {44}\n'