-
History on Speed: Media and the Politics of Forgetting in Milan Kundera's Slowness
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 52, Number 3, Fall 2006
- pp. 634-655
- 10.1353/mfs.2006.0067
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Kundera's Slowness subjects to critique Western media's efforts to police Eastern Europe's communist histories into teleologies of democracy, capitalism, and universal human rights. Slowness highlights these histories' reification through reductive images as it rethinks the very notion of history. Arguing that no historical narrative can disclose past "truths," Slowness resorts to fragmented images of communism, employing the media logic against itself to expose its ideological role in the production of historical master-narratives marketed to vast audiences. While Slowness' communist remembrance cannot access past "truths," it can expose its own marginalization in the present, fruitfully haunting the teleology of globalization.