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Collective Memory

Canales, Gustavo Sánchez . 2015. 'The benevolent self was a disgrace beyond measure for every argentine Jew': Between the Need to Remember and the Desire to Forget in Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases. Partial Answers 13(1): 57-71. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/565853. Publisher's Version

Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) is a novel structured around two interconnected plots. One of them is the tragedy of the desaparecidos — the disappeared — that began in 1976, the year when general Jorge Rafael Videla came to power after deposing María Estela Martínez de Perón; until early 1981 Videla’s junta was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of students and political opponents to his dictatorship. The other plot is the contradictory personal life of Kaddish Poznan, a Jew who, during the day, tries to keep alive the memory of his mother Favorita’s Argentine-Jewish past but at night works to destroy it by chiseling names off the gravestones of former members of the Society of the Benevolent Self, such as Favorita. Unlike Poznan, his wife Lillian, who has been laying a glass and a plate on the dinner table for her son Pato since his disappearance, refuses to acknowledge his death, In order to address the implications of this traumatic event in her life, I will resort to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). This article draws upon the significance of collective memory throughout Jewish history as discussed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), explores the struggle between memory and forgetting, and ponders the dangers of forgetting — and erasing — the past and of transforming one’s identity.

 

Gustavo Sánchez Canales teaches English at the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he is also Vicedean for Research and Innovation. He served as Viceadean for International Relations between 2011 and 2013. From 1999 to 2010 he taught English and American literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research focuses on contemporary Jewish-American Literature. He has published book chapters, articles, and essays on Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and  Michael Chabon, among others.

He has recently coedited with Victoria Aarons (Trinity, San Antonio, TX) a thematic volume on Philip Roth entitled History, Memory, and the Making of Character in Roth’s Fiction. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.2 (2014) http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss2/  

(updated in January 2016)

 

Barash, Jeffrey Andrew . 2012. Articulations of Memory: Reflections on Imagination and the Scope of Collective Memory in the Public Sphere. Partial Answers 10(2): 183-195. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/479765. Publisher's Version

During the decades following the pioneering work of authors such as Walter Benjamin or Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and 1930s, it has become increasingly common to refer to memory as a source not only of personal identity or of the identity of small groups but also of large collectivities. In recent years an ever growing number of studies in a variety of disciplines employ the concept of collective memory. Using the example of an episode from Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre tombe, this paper investigates the meaning of this concept in the methodological perspective of philosophy and the role of imagination in collectively remembered, communicable experience. It aims to elucidate the way in which collective memory might be demarcated from constructs of the imagination, above all in the public sphere.

 

January 2012: Jeffrey Andrew Barash is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amiens, France.  His publications have focused on the themes of political philosophy, historicism, and modern German thought. He is the author of three books:  Heidegger et son siècle:  Temps de l'Être, temps de l'histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (second, paperback edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), and Politiques de l'histoire:  L'historicisme comme promesse et comme mythe (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). He has edited The Social Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). He is currently completing a book entitled Collective Memory and the Historical Past and is also preparing a work on political mythology in the modern world.