|
Aberrations of Cultural Memory by Peter Krapp |
|
| Referring to a past that never was,
déjà vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also
with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the
term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized
in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy
and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of déjà
vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichéd
celebrations of cultural memory and forces us do a double take on the sanctimonious
warnings against forgetting so common in our time.
Disturbances of cultural memory—screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions—disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, déjà vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp’s analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner Müller, this exploration of the effects of déjà vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol’s work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet. |
Deja Vu Aberrations of Cultural Memory by Peter Krapp University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Order a copy. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
