There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never
forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society
itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as
Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles
in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and
dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of
collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical
basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in
relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash's analysis is a
look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of
collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies
of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such
technologies' capacity to simulate direct experience-especially via
the image-actually makes more palpable collective memory's
limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always
lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism,
however, he eventually looks to literature-specifically writers
such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald-to uncover
subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous
emblems of a past historical reality.
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