Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of AmnesiaAs we are approaching our fin de sielce, issues of time and memory haunt contemporary culture. Musuems and memorials are being constructed rapidly, as if there were no tomorrow. Contemporary art and literature focuses on memory and the past, rather than claiming radical breakthroughs into some unknown future. With the recent resurgence of nationalism and issues of national identity, the political future, too, seems to fold itself back into the past rather than offering a bold vision of the 21st century. The great paradox of our fin de siecle culture is that novelity is even more associated with memory and the past rather than future expectation. But if the obsession with memory is one salient symptom in this age of a modernity grown old, then cultural and political amnesia is undoubtedly its counterpoint. Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, "Twilight Memories" argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions withcultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality. In this book, the media are the hidden veil through which the author looks at the problem of cultural memory and an emerging new sensibility of temporality in literature, art, politics, media theory and the museum. |
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Adorno aesthetic aestheticization Alexander Kluge amnesia Anselm Kiefer articulated artist avant-garde Baudrillard Benjamin Berlin body Bohrer childhood Christa Wolf claim consciousness contemporary culture crisis critical critique Dada desire dialectic Dick Higgins discourse dominant East emerged enlightenment Ernst Jünger essay European exhibition experience fascism fascist architecture film Fluxus forgetting Frankfurt am Main George Maciunas German culture German nation Gruppe 47 Habermas Holocaust horror ideology Jürgen Habermas kind Kluge kynical language literary literature major Malte Malte's McLuhan modernist modernity monument museal museum MUSIK myth mythic narrative national identity Nazi novel obsession painting past political postmodern problematic question radical reality recent representation repression Rilke Rilke's Schirrmacher seems sense simply simulation Sloterdijk social stories strategies structures subjectivity Suhrkamp television temporality theory tion tradition TWILIGHT MEMORIES ultimately unification utopia visual Weimar West German Western Wolf debate Wolf's writing