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Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future. Francis O''Gorman shows how forgetting has been embraced as a requirement for modern existence and how our education, as well as life with fast-moving technology, further disconnects us from our pasts. But he also examines the cultural narratives that urge us to resist our collective amnesia. O''Gorman argues that such narratives, in rich but oblique ways, indicate our guilt about modernity''s great unmooring from history. Forgetfulness asks what the absence of history does to our sense of purpose, as well as what belonging both to time and place might mean in cultures without a memory. It is written in praise of the best achievement and deeds of the past, but is also an expression of profound anxiety about what forgetting them is doing to us.>
List of contents
Introduction
1. Cultures of Memory
2. The Making of Modern Forgetting
3. Contemporary Cultures of Amnesia
4. Forgetfulness in Contemporary Cultural Narrative
5. Learning Pasts
6. The Problems of Forgetting National and Local Histories
Acknowledgements
References
Index
Report
Offers a piercing insight into the modern era's fascination with newness and the resulting cultural implications. From a professor's perspective, I know that I have read a book worth my time and effort when I find it transforming how I see my daily life. Forgetfulness is such a book . full of insightful points and crucial discussions of the relationship between lost cultural memory and the modern habit of forgetting. Forgetfulness is an insightful exploration of an ephemeral, amnesiac modernity that both warrants careful examination and inspires lingering thought. Kay J. Walter Moveable Type
