Theories of Memory: Developing a Canon

Editing anthologies is a daunting and frequently thankless task. The editors are faced with strict space limitations and a tremendous amount of material for potential inclusion; the work is like having to create a representative puddle out of a boundless sea. When the anthology represents both the history of an idea and a new theoretical focus, as Theories of Memory: A Reader does, the difficulty is compounded by the relative novelty of the endeavor. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, the editors of the anthology, present the book as “a comprehensive survey of theories of memory from the classical period to the present day” (13), giving themselves the task, in just over three hundred pages, of identifying and representing the canonical works on memory in the Western tradition, and outlining the cutting edge of memory studies today.

Theories of Memory is published as a consequence of and in response to what the editors call the “memory boom” of the last decades of the twentieth century. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new interdisciplinary scholarly interest in memory began to have a significant impact on literary studies. The memory boom of the eighties and nineties has, in the new century, begun to see signs of institutionalization and canonization. In addition to the many books and articles published on the subject of memory, a large number of university classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels have taken memory as their focus. Many academic programs and institutes now offer memory studies as a concentration. In fact, this anthology is prefaced with a trace of its pedagogic origin, as the editors note its emergence from the MA in Literary Studies: Writing, Memory, Culture, taught in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. The editors offer a number of explanations for this “surge of interest” (5) in memory: an emergent re-engagement with theories of memory in the fields of holocaust studies, post-colonialism and poststructuralism; technological developments that have “led to a sophisticated engagement with and theorization of virtual memory” (5); new archival access to the suppressed histories of the Cold-War era in the former Soviet Union and the United States; the debates around “false memory syndrome” in the early 1990s; and Truth and Reconciliation commissions founded in South Africa, Guatemala and Chile tasked with the memory work of discovering and narrating past wrongdoings in the interest of national peace, justice and resolution. The capaciousness and variety of this list should begin to indicate both the excitement and difficulty of the field. Judged by a certain lens, almost anything can be considered to come under the purview of memory studies, and the category has the potential to become so expansive that it is nearly meaningless.

The new journal Memory Studies, which first appeared in January 2008, concentrates on the possibilities and dangers of this omnivorous expansiveness. Founded to “afford recognition, form, and direction to work in this nascent field, and provide a critical forum for dialogue and debate on the theoretical, empirical and methodological issues central to a collaborative understanding of memory today” (5), the journal has clear professional goals as well as academic ones. It envisions its role as legitimating a field of study as well as providing a framework for its development. However, the articles in the inaugural issue share a common anxiety about the expansiveness of the field and its multidisciplinary but not quite interdisciplinary nature. Indeed, some prominent names in memory studies, including Wulf Kansteiner and Pierre Nora, have been suspicious of the upsurge in popularity of memory studies, conscious of the problem of defining and containing the multiple ways of understanding the forms and functions of the past, and critical of the contemporary fetishization of memory that has its correlative in the development of this academic field.

Anthologies play a key role in the definition of new areas and fields of study; they serve as introductions for new students and emerging scholars, and begin to define a canon for...