Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis

by Richard Terdiman

Overview

This book is about memory—about how the past persists into the present, and about how this persistence has been understood over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, memory has been the source of an intense disquiet. Fundamental cultural theories have sought to understand it, and have striven to represent its stresses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801428975
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/09/1993
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.31(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Richard Terdiman is Professor of Literature and the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Editorial Reviews

This breathtaking explication of the importance of memory in modernity sets the stage for brilliant readings that analyze a series of canonical works as symptoms of and reflections on the memory crisis.... Present Past is most importantly a contribution to our historical understanding of modernism and modernity.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies - Eugene W. Holland

This breathtaking explication of the importance of memory in modernity sets the stage for brilliant readings that analyze a series of canonical works as symptoms of and reflections on the memory crisis.... Present Past is most importantly a contribution to our historical understanding of modernism and modernity.

--Eugene W. Holland "Nineteenth-Century French Studies"

From the Publisher