Deja Vu: Aberrations Of Cultural Memory: 12 (Electronic Mediations) - Softcover

Krapp, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816643350 ISBN 13: 9780816643356

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2004

Synopsis

The pitfalls of cultural memory and forgetting, understood through the genealogy of the phenomenon called déjà vu

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.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Krapp, assistant professor of new media at University of California at Irvine, coedited “Medium Cool,” a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on contemporary media theory. He has published in the fields of German studies, media studies, and literary theory and, since 1995, has acted as editor of the Hydra web site for theories of literature and media.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816643350
• ISBN 13: 9780816643356
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296