Abstract
I relate the memory phenomenon to the shift in late twentieth-century conceptions of historical time from an accent on progress looking toward the future to one on nostalgia for the lost promise of the past. I review the newfound scholarly interest in nostalgia in both modern and postmodern conceptions of its nature. Such scholarship highlights the ambiguity of nostalgia: it elicits bittersweet emotions not only for what was, but also for what might have been. In the latter guise, nostalgia is reconceived as a resource for renewal. I close with the suggestion that the current scholarly fascination with Walter Benjamin’s visionary conception of history is derived from his conception of nostalgia as messianic hope for lost causes and failed projects worthy of revival.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne; rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), 11–17, 63.
- 2.
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 106–19.
- 3.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 246–88.
- 4.
Robert Mandrou, Introduction à la France moderne, 1500–1640 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974), 75–89.
- 5.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process; The Development of Manners (1939; New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 58–59.
- 6.
Thomas Dodman, “Un Pays pour la colonie: mourir de nostalgie en Algérie Française, 1830–1880,” Annales HSS 66/3 (2011): 743–83.
- 7.
It is true that scholarship on the history of commemoration, a central interest in memory studies dating from the late 1970s, provided an avenue toward understanding nostalgia as regret for a cherished past. But such studies emphasized the politics of contested identities, the interpretative strategy underpinning the notion of the “invented tradition.” See Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition Revisited,” in Legitimacy and the State in Africa, ed. Terence Ranger and Megan Vaughan (London: Palgrave, 1993), 62–82.
- 8.
See the studies by Michael S. Roth on nostalgia as malady in nineteenth-century medical discourse: “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France,” History and Memory 3 (1991): 5–29; “Remembering Forgetting: Maladies de la Mémoire in Nineteenth-Century France,” Representations 26 (1989): 49–68; “The Time of Nostalgia: Medicine, History and Normality in 19th Century France,” Time and Society.1 (1992: 281–84. See also Janelle L. Wilson, Nostalgia; Sanctuary of Meaning (Lewisberg,, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 21–24.
- 9.
Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday; A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: The Free Press, 1979), 1–29, 110. From a historiographical standpoint, Davis’s discussion of the collective nature of nostalgia invites comparison with that of Maurice Halbwachs on the larger topic of collective memory. So too in their reception. At the time of their respective publications, their theories received little scholarly attention, only to come into play decades later. Like Halbwachs, Davis expounds on the relationship between social power and collective memory. Both explain how personal memories are localized within social contexts.
- 10.
Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 111–16.
- 11.
Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present; Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 45, 49, 142, 201–02, as well as his preliminary studies, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 64–65, and “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001), 1589, 1592.
- 12.
Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 11–54.
- 13.
Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” 62–85; idem, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” 1587–1618. See also Philippe Ariès, Le Temps de l’Histoire (1954; Paris: Seuil, 1986), 33–43, who explains how his family’s nostalgia for the traditions of old France served as his path into history.
- 14.
Fritzsche: Stranded in the Present, 11–54, 201–18; “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” 66–68; “Specters of History,” 1594–1600.
- 15.
Fritzsche:”How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” 67, 76–77; “Specters of History,” 1589–91, 1602.
- 16.
Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 7, 77, 88,154,159. Here, we might say, Fritzsche introduces a historiographical interest in the tempo of historical time that contrasts dramatically with that of the once popular Annales school of historiography, which placed its accent on the inertial pace of time, that is, time as immobilized in the preindustrial societies of early modern Europe. See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s essay, “L’Histoire immobile” in his Le Territoire de l’historien (Gallimard,1978), 2: 7–34.
- 17.
Fritzsche: Stranded in the Present, 80–83, 87, 90, 128; “Specters of History,” 1607–1609.
- 18.
Fritzsche: Stranded in the Present, 9, 79, 160–200; “Specters of History,” 1600–01, 1605, 1616; “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” 79.
- 19.
Charles Rearick, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories; The City and its Mystique (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 44–81.
- 20.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xiv–xv; www.svetlanaboym.com
- 21.
Ibid., 351.
- 22.
Ibid., 57–71.
- 23.
Ibid., 83–91, 327–36.
- 24.
Ibid., 41–55; “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review 9 (2007): 7–18.
- 25.
Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 61, 149–56.
- 26.
Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” (University of Toronto English Department, 1998) http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html
- 27.
Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 118–42. See also David Gross, The Past in Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 75–76.
- 28.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 19–20, 156; “Nostalgia for the Present,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 517–37.
- 29.
Elias, Civilizing Process, 58–59, 134–43, 180–205.
- 30.
Patrick Hutton, “Walter Benjamin: The Consolation of History in a Paris Exile,” Historical Reflections 36/1 (2010): 76–94.
- 31.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4: 389–400.
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Hutton, P.H. (2016). Nostalgia and the Mnemonics of Time. In: The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49466-5_6
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