Performing the Past : Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe

Throughout Europe, narratives about the past circulate at a dizzying speed, and producing and selling these narratives is big business. In museums, in cinema and opera houses, in schools, and even on the Internet, Europeans are using the power of performance to craft stories that ultimately define the ways their audiences understand and remember history. __\ Performing the Past__ offers unparalleled insights into the philosophical, literary, musical, and historical frameworks within which the past has entered into the European imagination. The essays in this volume, from such internationally renowned scholars as Reinhart Koselleck, Jan Assmann, Jane Caplan, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Peter Burke, and Alessandro Portelli, investigate various national and disciplinary traditions to explain how Europeans see themselves in the past, in the present, and in the years to come. Table of Contents......Page 6 Preface......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 10 CH1. The performance of the past: memory, history, identity......Page 12 CH2. Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past......Page 36 CH3. Repetitive structures in language and history......Page 52 CH4. Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past......Page 68 CH5. Co-memorations. Performing the past......Page 106 CH6. ‘Indelible memories’: the tattooed body as theatre of memory......Page 120 CH7. Incongruous images. ‘Before, during, and after’ the Holocaust......Page 148 CH8. Radio Clandestina: from oral history to the theatre......Page 176 CH9. Music and memory in Mozart’s Zauberflöte......Page 188 CH10. The many afterlives of Ivanhoe......Page 208 CH11. Novels and their readers, memories and their social frameworks......Page 236 CH12. Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation......Page 258 CH13. ‘In these days of convulsive political change’. Discourse and display in the revolutionary museum, 1793-1815......Page 288 CH14. Restitution as a means of remembrance. Evocations of the recent past in the Czech Republic and Poland after 1989......Page 306 CH15. European identity and the politics of remembrance......Page 336 About the Authors......Page 362 List of Illustrations......Page 368 Special 10,- discount for our ABG now 24,50 instead of 34,50 Performing the Past is an investigation of the multiple social and culture practices through which Europeans have negotiated the space between their history and their memory over the past 200 years. In museums, in opera houses, in the streets, in the schools, in theatres, in films, on the internet and beyond, narratives about the past circulate today at a dizzying speed. Producing and selling them is big business; if the past is indeed a foreign country, there are tens of thousands of tourist agents, guides, and pundits around to help us on our way, for a fee, to be sure.This collection of essays by renowned scholars from, among others, Yale, Columbia, Amsterdam Oxford, Cambridge, New York University and the European University Institute in Florence, is essential reading for anyone interested in todays memory boom. Drawing on different national and disciplinary traditions, the authors ultimately engage us with the ways in which Europeans continue a venerable tradition of finding out who they are, and where they are going, by performing the past. Performing the past" is an investigation of the multiple social and culture practices through which Europeans have negotiated the space between their history and their memory over the past 200 years. In museums, in opera houses, in the streets, in the schools, in theatres, in films, on the internet and beyond, narratives about the past circulate today at a dizzying speed. Producing and selling them is big business; if the past is indeed a foreign country, there are tens of thousands of tourist agents, guides, and pundits around to help us on our way, for a fee, to be sure. This collection of essays by renowned scholars from, among others, Yale, Columbia, Amsterdam Oxford, Cambridge, New York University and the European University Institute in Florence, is essential reading for anyone interested in today's memory boom. Drawing on different national and disciplinary traditions, the authors ultimately engage us with the ways in which Europeans continue a venerable tradition of finding out who they are, and where they are going, by performing the past

In the series Solidarity and Identitya highly readable study of gift-giving in seventeenth- century Holland across the social spectrum of the period.

Karin Tilmans, Frank Van Vree And Jay Winter (eds.) Includes Bibliographical References.