Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia

Description

In this new collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past. The great paradox of our fin-de-siecle culture is that novelty is even more associated with memory than with future expectation. Drawing heavily on the dilemmas of contemporary Germany, Huyssen's discussion of cultural memory illustrates the nature of contemporary nationalism, the work of such artists and thinkers as Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Kluge, and Jean Baudrillard, and many others. The book includes illustrations from contemporary Germany.

Andreas Huyssen is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

"Though my shelves sag beneath the weight of excellent new books on what I have come to think of as "collected memory," one title that especially stands out is "Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia by Andreas Huyssen...It offers lucid reevaluations of how public memory has been forged in postmodern European culture by examining the way writers...artists...and movements...negotiate history and memory in their works."
-James Young, University of Massachusetts