Inventing the Past: Memory Work in Culture and History

Inventing the Past: Memory Work in Culture and History
Our age is obsessed with memory: its specter haunts an array of activities, intellectual, creative, and commercial; its processes shadow our individual and collective lives. And yet, despite this ubiquity, the idea of memory remains elusive and forever mutable, for depending on the context in which it is thought and the purpose for which it is intended, it takes on a range of forms. The twelve essays assembled here reflect a variety of approaches to the phenomenon of memory: historical, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic. They read the relationship between history and memory as well as between natural and artificial memory; locate memory as a critical staging of the past; analyse the links between memory and mimesis; reflect on reminiscence as an acknowledgment of otherness; and consider the relationships among nostalgia, melancholy, and trauma, the legal claims of memory, and the challenges of witnessing the past. Common to all the essays is an interest in the imaginative potential inherent in memory and a concern with the ethical implications of any invention of the past.
International Cooper Series in English Language and Literature (ICSELL
The International Cooper Series in English Language and Literature (which appeared from 1956 to 1990 under the title «Cooper Monographs»), usually known as ICSELL, has since 2001 been published by Schwabe. The series is international both in the range of scholars represented in it and in the prominence given to comparative topics from linguistics and literary studies. It encompasses the English language in all its forms and aspects and all genres of literature throughout the English-speaking world. This gives due recognition to the international status of English, something that is particularly evident in Switzerland, and, most appropriately, it was the international nature of the English language that provided the topic for the first volume to appear at the new publishers (Perspectives on English as a World Language, ICSELL 6).The editors of ICSELL are the professors of English at the University of the city variously known as Basle, Basel and Bâle, and internationally situated on the Rhine at the junction of Switzerland, Germany and France.