Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia

by Huyssen,Andreas

• ISBN13: 9780415909341
• ISBN10: 0415909341
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-02-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

As 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 Memoriesargues 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Time and Cultural Memory at Our Fin de Siecle	p. 1
Time and Memory
Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium	p. 13
After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals	p. 37
Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Identities after Unification	p. 67
Memories of Utopia	p. 85
Media and Culture
Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge	p. 105
Fortifying the Heart - Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts	p. 127
Alexander Kluge: An Analytic Storyteller in the Course of Time	p. 145
Postenlightened Cynicism: Diogenies as Postmodern Intellectual	p. 157
In the Shadow of McLuhan: Baudrillard's Theory of Simulation	p. 175
Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context	p. 191
Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth	p. 209
Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age	p. 249
Notes	p. 261
Index	p. 279
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