In this Book
- Deja Vu: Aberrations Of Cultural Memory
- Book
- 2004
- Published by: University of Minnesota Press
- Series: Electronic Mediations
summary
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.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- Been There, Done That
- pp. ix-xxviii
- 4. Andy’s Wedding: Reading Warhol
- pp. 71-96
- 6. Screen Memories: Hypertext
- pp. 119-142
- 7. Wrapping It Up: Mummy Effects
- pp. 143-154
Additional Information
ISBN
9780816695867
Related ISBN(s)
9780816643356
MARC Record
OCLC
290500009
Pages
296
Launched on MUSE
2015-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No