Essay from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and
Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Distinction, University of
Newcastle upon Tyne (School of English Literature, Language and
Linguistics), course: Reading the Past, 9 entries in the
bibliography, language: English, abstract: The semantic field
opened up by the term modernity describes a multifaceted body of
experiences that are seen as somehow different from earlier, more
traditional modes of experience. This modern "experience of space
and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and
perils" seems to be marked by a sense of perpetual change brought
about by the continuous and relentless application of
techno-scientific knowledge (Berman 1983:2). The perpetually
shifting paradigms of scientific knowledge and the social
consequences of the application of techno-science to the
subjugation of nature undermine any notion of stability and
continuity. Pierre Nora's use of the phrase "acce leration of
history" to signify "an increasingly rapid slippage of the present
into a historical past that is gone for good" crystallizes the
general sense of uncertainty which is often seen as an integral
part of modern experience (Nora 1989:7). In the following passage
Nora introduces a distinction between memory and history: On the
hand, we find an integrated, dictatorial memory - unself-conscious,
commanding, allpowerful, spontaneously actualizing, a memory
without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the
history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes,
origins, and myth - and on the other hand, our memory, nothing more
in fact than sifted and sorted historical traces (Nora 1989:8) . In
order to critique "how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies,
propelled by change, organize the past" Nora juxtaposes an archaic,
undifferentiated, mythical form of memory, which ties a community
organically to its past with modern historiography, which produces
simulacra of a memory th
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