Remaking memory and the agency of the aesthetic

This article examines the role of the creative arts in renegotiating the border between memorable and unmemorable lives. It does so with specific reference to the (un)forgetting of the colonial soldiers in European armies during World War One. Focussing on the role of aesthetic form in generating me...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMemory studies Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 10 - 23
Main Author Rigney, Ann
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.02.2021
Subjects
multiscalar analysis
colonial soldiers
memorability
resonance
World War One
defamiliarisation
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Summary:This article examines the role of the creative arts in renegotiating the border between memorable and unmemorable lives. It does so with specific reference to the (un)forgetting of the colonial soldiers in European armies during World War One. Focussing on the role of aesthetic form in generating memorability, it shows how the creative use of a medium can help redefine the borders of imagined communities by commanding the attention of individual subjects and hence providing conditions for a cognitive and affective opening to the memory of strangers. It concludes that future studies of transformations in collective memory should take a multiscalar approach which takes into account both the shifting social frameworks of memory and the small changes that occur in the micro-politics of viewing and reading.
ISSN:1750-6980
1750-6999
DOI:10.1177/1750698020976456