New PDF release: The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical

In the prior decade, Jeffrey Olick has proven himself as one of many world’s pre-eminent sociologists of reminiscence (and, concerning this, either cultural sociology and social theory). His fresh e-book on reminiscence in postwar Germany, In the home of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered loads of acclaim. This publication collects his most sensible essays on more than a few reminiscence comparable concerns and provides a number of new ones. it really is extra conceptually expansive than his different paintings and should function a good creation to this significant theorist. long ago region century, the problem of reminiscence has not just develop into an more and more vital analytical class for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has turn into pervasive in pop culture besides. a part of this can be a functionality of the improved position of either narrative and illustration – the development blocks of reminiscence, so that you could communicate – around the social sciences and arts. simply as importantly, notwithstanding, there has additionally been an expanding attractiveness of the proposal that the prior is not any longer the province historians on my own. also, acknowledging the significance of social reminiscence has not just supplied organisation to boring humans by way of realizing the previous, it has made conflicting interpretations of the that means of the prior extra fraught, fairly in mild of the bad occasions of the 20th century.

Olick appears to be like at how catastrophic, poor pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, yet he's quite interested in the function that reminiscence performs in social constructions. reminiscence can foster any variety of issues – social unity, nostalgia, civil warfare – however it continually relies on either the character of the prior and the cultures doing the remembering. sooner than his reviews of person episodes, he absolutely develops his thought of reminiscence and society, operating via Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.