Memory - The Ancient Art Of Memory, Modern Memory And Personal Identity, The Social Frameworks Of Collective Memory
episodic conscious semantic
The history of the idea of memory is associated with the cultural uses of two kinds of memory, episodic and semantic. Episodic memory concerns the conscious recall of particular events. Interest in its nature dates from antiquity, and mnemonic techniques for strengthening memory's resources, known as the "art of memory," were developed as rhetorical skills. Semantic memory deals in tacit understandings—habits of mind and implicit knowledge on the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. In modern times, scholars have treated it as a realm apart from episodic memory in light of a newly discovered awareness of the significance of the social contexts of collective memory.
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In ancient Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was revered as mother of the Muses of the arts and sciences. Ever since, students of memory have acknowledged memory's creative power to evoke the imaginative forms through which humankind represents the reality of its experience. The ancient idea of memory was grounded in the concept of mimesis, according to which memory and ima…
The spread of print literacy by the eighteenth century transformed the cultural understanding of episodic memory. In print culture, collective knowledge could be easily preserved in readily accessible, alphabetically indexed reference books, rendering obsolete the practical applications of the art of memory in information retrieval. The psychological effect was to free memory for personal reflecti…
In the early twentieth century, near the time when Freud's findings were being popularized, sociologists began to inquire into the nature of semantic memory as a realm of remembrance of a different order—socially conditioned memory, often tacitly understood. Here the memory was considered in its social context, as subject to social and cultural influences. The French philosopher Henr…
In the twenty-first century, we know more about memory than ever before, but trust its resources less. The idea of memory, conceived as the keystone of identity for the nineteenth century, has been reconceived as the debris of lost identities, the free-stones of aging memory palaces that have fallen into ruins. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, the topic has inspired intense interes…
Among contexts contributing to the idea of memory's fragility in the twenty-first century, one might highlight the following: The degree to which the workings of memory elude research in the biological sciences is dramatized by the difficulties of understanding the perplexing diseases that lead to the deterioration of memory in old age. Freud's faith in the prospect of memory retriev…
The dispute about the relationship between memory and history was put in philosophical perspective by the French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur (b. 1913). After reviewing the many routes of scholarly inquiry into the idea of memory at the turn of the twenty-first century, he closes his analysis with a meditation on the concerns of the historians of the Holocaust about history's premature clai…
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Edelman, Gerald M. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Gillis, John R., ed. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Pr…
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