Publisher's Synopsis
Crucial to Barash's analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies' capacity to simulate direct experience-especially via the image-actually makes more palpable collective memory's limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature-specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald-to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.