The Representation of Conflict in Modern Memory Work

Abstract

The term ‘memory work’ – a phrase derived from the German (or in French ‘travail de mémoire’, to adopt Pierre Nora’s [1998] term), is now used in multiple ways, from neuroscience to feminist writing. For the purpose of this chapter, the phrase refers to a concept derived from literary criticism, which has now also passed into cultural–historical work on collective (cultural or social) memory. It is an analytical construction that is more than the sum of its parts (e.g., individual memories) and contingent to, but different from ‘history’, or ‘historical memory’ or the ‘archive’ (public history), to which it, nevertheless, contributes. Methodologically it encompasses all disciplines and none: promiscuously diverse from hermeneutics to oral testimony, almost anything goes! The approach adopted here is thus an intellectual and cultural history in a new critical form that relocates to the past remembered.