Afterword

whither memory studies

Lubomir Doležel

pp. 172-175

in: Astrid Erll, Memory in culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Looking back on the history of memory studies, at least two distinct phases are discernible: A first phase in the 1920s and 1930s, with Maurice Halbwachs, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Frederic Bartlett, Karl Mannheim and others as protagonists; and a second phase starting roughly in the mid-1980s, with Pierre Nora's work on lieux de mémoire as its most prominent manifestation. After those two phases, the first characterized by pioneering research that extended across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, the second equally open to a range of different perspectives on memory, yet more thematically focused on national remembrance and traumatic events — will there be a third phase of memory studies? Or will the field merely consolidate and continue in the mode established since the mid-1980s?