Collective Memory

This short essay addresses the recent memory discourse surrounding the subject of German victimhood during the Third Reich as well as during and immediately after the Second World War. It briefly introduces Collective Memory as a field of study; some of the issues relating to the study of collective memory in this specific context; specific examples of the more recent debates, and some of the complicating factors, which make this a particularly challenging test case both for the subject of Epistemology as a whole and Collective Memory in particular.

Le deuxième volume des Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg montre que la mémoire collective n’a pas uniquement un ancrage national. Elle se sert également de cadres locaux, régionaux ou transnationaux. Elle change selon le point de vue employé. Les auteurs ici rassemblés se réfèrent au Luxembourg actuel, mais essaient à la fois de voir plus loin et de regarder de plus près, en se penchant sur les différences internes de la société luxembourgeoise. Ils offrent ainsi un nouveau regard sur des personnalités connues (de Yolande de Vianden à Thierry van Werveke), sur les guerres et conflits, les mouvements contestataires et les pratiques de la vie de tous les jours. Les 40 articles montrent qu’un lieu de mémoire peut avoir plusieurs significations, parfois contradictoires. De St. Willibrord aux frontaliers, en passant par le Kirchberg, Cattenom et le Congo… tous les lieux de mémoire suscitent certaines images auprès du lecteur. Mais d’où viennent ces images ? Ce livre richement illustré donne des réponses … souvent surprenantes !

"      Traumatic events contain the ability to shatter one’s life in a quick instant.  Suddenly memories carry a new meaning that is lost in a cloud of confusion.  Identities are shifted and morphed into newfound entities.  The traumatic events during the Troubles in Northern Ireland left the divided communities with new and varying memories that assisted in the construction of narratives.  The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 came short of ending violence in Northern Ireland.  Reconciliation continued to be an illusion brought forward by the Agreement, and peace an idea
without a reality.
 
    This study examines the possible use of testimonial therapy as a form of communal and individual healing and reconciliation in the Northern Ireland context.  The traumatic events during “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland left a legacy in the memories and stories of the divided communities, epitomized by the recent riots of 2011.  The invisible wounds of the Troubles create significant obstacles to the healing and reconciliation of individuals and communities across the country.  Testimonial therapy is a method for sharing stories, acknowledging memories, and exploring the meanings of past experiences.  The technique generates new narratives with the potential to not only transform realities but also to restore the sense of self (Almog, 2007).  Without suggesting that testimonial therapy can bring reconciliation to all of Northern Ireland, I examine its potential effectiveness with individuals and communities who feel ready to share their narratives and open to hearing opposing narratives.




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Memory is studied across a bewildering range of disciplines and subdisciplines in the neural, cognitive, and social sciences, and the term covers a wide range of related phenomena. In an integrative spirit, this chapter examines two case studies in memory research in which empirically-informed philosophy and philosophically-informed sciences of the mind can be mutually informative, such that the interaction between psychology and philosophy can open up new research problems—and set new challenges—for our understanding of certain aspects of memory. In each case, there is already enough interdisciplinary interaction on specific issues to give some confidence in the potential productivity of mutual exchange: but in each case, residual gulfs in research style and background assumptions remain to be addressed. The two areas are the developmental psychology of autobiographical memory, and the study of shared memories and social memory phenomena.

This article explores some French Canadian (Québec) students’ historical consciousness of the nation through the lens of Social Identity Theory (SIT). Informed by SIT principles, our narrative analysis shows how most Franco-Québécois categorize the past in homogenous categories (e.g., the imperialist Anglophone; the surviving Francophone) and frame their stories into particular modes of present-day orientations. Implications of this study for history education are also discussed.

This essay addresses Yeats’ understanding of memory, and how it relates to Irish identity. In book III of A Vision, Yeats deploys terms such as ”the Dreaming Back”, and ”the Return” in order to define how the deceased gradually loosen their bonds with their past lives. For most commentators, this scheme is at best a useful aid to understand a text like Purgatory, and at worst a distracting irrelevancy. Bringing Yeats’ theory into the orbit of texts like ”Easter, 1916” and The Dreaming of the Bones, it is shown here how Yeats’ understanding of the recollection of ghosts interacts with his concern that Ireland must leave behind itself ruinous collective fixations on the past. It is demonstrated that this understanding of memory as a potential instrument of collective catharsis interacts with Yeats’ focus – particularly evident in his autobiographical texts from 1916 and onwards - on how the individual poet must work through his past in order to free an imaginative space for future exploration. Throughout, Yeats’ understanding of memory is linked with the thought of Jacques Derrida.

"The aim of this paper is to study the funeral oration given by Demosthenes in 338 BC, to better understand the role of the past as a source of resilience during the Athenian identity crisis after the defeat by Macedon at Chaironeia.

The funeral oration or epitaphios has often been offhandedly treated as an uninventive and repetitive genre, employing stock themes to reach a never-changing goal: to praise the war dead by promoting polis identity. In 1981 however, Nicole Loraux published a groundbreaking work on the Athenian funeral oration, L’invention d’Athènes. In this book, she focused on the shared mythical and historical past as an important theme in the genre. This type of ‘memory study’ has become immensely popular in the past two decades, but where the ancient world is concerned it has mostly focused on classical fifth-century Athens. I would however like to shed more light on the function of memories of a shared past at the end of the fourth century BC, in what is now known as the Lycurgan period.

Ushered in by the battle of Chaironeia in 338 BC, at which Athens suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Philip II of Macedon, the Lycurgan period was a time of identity crisis for the Athenians. This sense of desperation and loss of identity inspired a series of reforms aimed at reinforcing not only military strength, but also civic pride. New insights into the mechanics of the shaping of civic identity have greatly increased interest in this turbulent episode of Athenian history in the past five years, coinciding with the current ‘boom’ in memory studies. The funeral oration, even though two of the six extant samples are dated to this period, has however not received much attention in this light.

Indeed, after Loraux, the only one to devote serious attention to the epitaphios was Rosalind Thomas in her 1989 Oral Tradition & Written Record in Classical Athens. The funeral oration is however still only rarely seen as a useful source from which we can learn more about a specific moment in time. The goal here is to bring the funeral oration by Demosthenes into narrower focus, relating it to its specific historical circumstances and focusing on its evocation of social memory to show its unique and inventive character. Contrasting this epitaphios with that of Hypereides, which was held in 322 BC after Athens had booked several victories over Macedonian armies, will especially highlight its importance as an instrument of resilience in the city’s time of crisis.
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This paper considers the implications for cultural heritage of observations regarding individual and collective memory which suggest that the process of forgetting is in fact integral to remembering―that one cannot properly form new memories and attach value to them without also selecting some things to forget. Remembering is an active process of cultivating and pruning, and not one of complete archiving and total recall, which would overwhelm and cause us to be unable to make confident decisions about which memories are valuable and which are not. I argue that the same is true of heritage; that as a result of its increasingly broad definition, and the exponential growth of listed objects, places and practices of heritage in the contemporary world, we hazard becoming overwhelmed by memory and in the process rendering heritage ineffective and worthless. I refer to the consequence of this heterogeneous piling up of disparate and conflicting pasts in the present as a ‘crisis’ of accumulation of the past. To deal with this crisis adequately, we must pay increased attention to the management of heritage. This should not only refer to processes of preservation and conservation, but also to active decisions to de-list or cease to conserve particular forms of heritage once their significance to contemporary and future societies can no longer be demonstrated. De-accessioning and disposal must become a key area of attention for critical heritage studies in the coming decades if heritage is to remain sustainable and uphold its claims to relevance in contemporary global societies.

The reminiscence bump is the higher prevalence of autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood. The reminiscence bump has also been found in the memory for public events, which Koppel and Berntsen (2014) recently suggested could be explained by cultural life scripts. Life scripts are culturally shared knowledge about the order and timing of life events in an idealized life course. They are examined by categorizing which events are expected to occur in a prototypical person’s life and when these events are supposed to occur. The present study found, however, no support for life scripts as an explanation for the reminiscence bump in the memory for public events. Most public events were expected to occur before the reminiscence bump period. Although there was some agreement about which public events are likely to happen in a prototypical person’s life, there was little agreement about when these events are supposed to occur.

"Within the housing research-policy-practice nexus the social and institutional interests of
policy makers, urban researchers and public housing tenants are often rehearsed as duelling political projects. This presents challenges when these social actors share research space or attempt to work toward shared research and/or policy outcomes. Instead of reinforcing the conflict that often emerges between these three social identities, we draw on insights from assemblage theory to rethink collective biography as a method for investigating the relationality of our social experiences. Applying Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage theory to collective biography exposes the relationality between the power structures, knowledge systems and social identities. In this paper we provide reflections that might enable a more nuanced understanding of the space between housing research, policy and practice. We suggest there might be scope for applying collective biography within investigative panels or action research methodologies, especially by those attempting to implement housing related change in the face of conflict."

"La Seconde Guerre mondiale est un des événements les plus traumatiques vécus en Europe au cours du XXe siècle. C’est aussi l’un des plus commentés, discutés, mis en récit. C’est précisément à l’étude de ces romans que se consacre Yan Hamel dans La bataille des mémoires.

Cette étude est nécessaire parce que plusieurs des plus grands écrivains contemporains ont essayé de donner un sens à ce qui ne paraissait pas en avoir. La bataille des mémoires fait entendre les voix de Vercors et de Julien Gracq, de Lydie Salvayre et de Marguerite Duras, de Romain Gary et de Louis-Ferdinand Céline, de Jorge Semprun et de Jean Rouaud, de Jean Genet et de Michel Tournier, sans oublier celles de Simone de Beauvoir, Roger Nimier, Roger Vailland, Marcel Aymé, Claude Simon et Patrick Modiano.

Il fallait aussi se pencher sur leurs œuvres, car elles soulèvent des problèmes fondamentaux. Comment arrive-t-on à dire ce qui paraît si difficile à dire : la guerre, la mort, l’oubli ? Que peut la littérature devant une tragédie comme celle des années 1939-1945 ? Les écrivains peuvent-ils rester à l’écart des drames de leur époque et ne pas s’engager ? Voici quelques-unes des questions difficiles, et essentielles, auxquelles La bataille des mémoires apporte des réponses.

Yan Hamel est chercheur post-doctoral au Département des lettres françaises de l’Université d’Ottawa. Il a publié plusieurs articles sur la littérature française contemporaine et il a coédité deux volumes collectifs : Victor Hugo (2003-1802) (2003) et Des mots et des muscles ! (2005).

Mention honorable, prix Raymond-Klibansky de la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines (2007-2008)
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