<i>Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama</i> (review)

With the advent of online distribution and the rise of multiple media devices, claims of the cinema’s imminent death have surfaced with greater intensity than ever before. Of course, with an ever-widening array of platforms these accounts have placed a newfound emphasis on the cinema as a distinctive physical space, one that plays host to a very particular and much cherished cultural activity. This article considers the substance of these claims by tracing a very particular historical route. Firstly, be revisiting Baudry’s notion of the dispositif, this article detects the importance of the physical environment in the process of film consumption. Secondly, I relate this emphasis on the physical to the traditional notion of the cinephile, a practice that ritualises the cinema experience. Many accounts across the spectrum of film history will attest to the profound ways in which the physical experience of the cinema summons a rich emotional response. Lastly, I consider how the cinema and the collective nature of film consumption provides an authentic trace to the past and a very certain time and place in history. In turn, despite competition from cheaper and more convenient platforms, this article will endeavour to show how the cinema retains its place at the centre of contemporary film culture. KEYWORDS Cinema, dispositif, cinephilia, cultural memory.

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NOTES ON NORTH AMERICAN HESPERIDÆ

The Canadian Entomologist ◽

10.4039/ent24119-5 ◽

1892 ◽

Vol 24 (5) ◽

pp. 119-120

Author(s):

Eugene Murray Aaron

Keyword(s):

North American ◽

Large Collection ◽

The Past

From time to time for the past ten years I have been in the habit of receiving, from various collectors in this country and Europe, speciments of North American Hesperidœ for comparison and identification with my large collection, which has been justly famous for its completeness. As this collection is now no longer in my possession, being now the property of my friend C. B. Aaron, of Philadelphis, and as I have transferred my allegiance from entomology to ethnology it has occurred to me that it will be well fro me to give here to the students of the Hesperidœ the benefit of such tables, nots teh compilations as have, in years past, been of value to me in the identification of the species in this difficult family.

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Caldera of New Spain: Frontier Justice and Mestizo Symbol

The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History ◽

10.2307/979300 ◽

1961 ◽

Vol 17 (4) ◽

pp. 325-342

Author(s):

Philip Wayne Powell

Keyword(s):

North American ◽

New Spain ◽

Historical Events ◽

American Frontier ◽

The Past ◽

Extensive Documentation ◽

Critical Phase

In any study of extensive documentation of the past, one inevitably encounters personalities whose recorded actions stimulate speculation about the unknowable portions of their lives and their impact upon larger historical events. Such a one, to me, is the man called Miguel Caldera. For some years, and through many thousands of pages of Mexican frontier documentation, I have been increasingly intrigued by the story of this mestizo captain. He is omnipresent in the official papers of a critical phase of North American frontier history. His deeds—and their setting—have a dramatic, symbolistic quality which entitles him, I think, to recognition as one of the continent's most significant frontiersmen. Hence this present attempt—brief and incidental though it is—to “define” Miguel Caldera and his measure of significance.

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City’s Cultural Memory: Modern Practices of Symbolizing the Past

Observatory of Culture ◽

10.25281/2072-3156-2021-18-4-352-364 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 352-364

Author(s):

Natalia G. Fedotova

Keyword(s):

Cultural Memory ◽

Point Of View ◽

Fundamental Aspect ◽

Modern World ◽

Cultural Meanings ◽

Urban Identity ◽

Symbolic Forms ◽

The Past ◽

Symbolic Resource ◽

The City

The article is devoted to the discourse of the city’s cultural memory. The relevance of studying this topic is determined not only by the fundamental aspect associated with the episodicity of existing studies of this phenomenon. From an applied point of view, the city’s cultural memory is a symbolic resource that can be used to create an appealing image, form a sustainable urban identity, and strengthen the citizen’s sense of belonging to the city. The accumulation and objectification of cultural memory take place in symbolic forms, which makes it important to study the practices of symbolizing the urban past, the essence of which is to generate the significance of the relevant or latent layers of cultural memory for the citizens.The article presents the results of the final stage of research related to the study of the process of constructing the cultural memory of the city. The purpose of the article is to analyze modern practices of symbolizing fragments of the urban past, which mean their significance for contemporaries. Basing on the culturological cross-section of the issue, the author integrates different research contexts. The methodological basis of the article is the communicative approach that focuses on the processes of meaning formation, and the constructivist method that considers memory as a multi-layered and dynamic construct. Analyzing the practices of symbolizing the urban past by the example of Russian cities, the author of the article demonstrates how the episodes of the city’s memory are updated in the modern world, how cultural meanings become memorable for citizens. The author uses the results of previous studies and identifies the following elements of the symbolization of the urban past: a) ways of encoding fragments of the past; b) communicative trajectories of memory symbolization; c) factors of producing meanings about the collective past of the city. The obtained results open up new frontiers in understanding the processes of formation of the collective ideas about the city, and prospects for empirical research, forecasting and constructing the cultural memory of Russian cities, giving them the opportunity to change their present and future.

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A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America

Cultural Anthropology ◽

10.14506/ca31.3.09 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 438-457 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Katie Kilroy-Marac

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Mental Disorder ◽

North American ◽

Popular Media ◽

Hoarding Disorder ◽

The Past ◽

The North ◽

Dsm V ◽

Double Movement ◽

Domestic Variety

Within the past decade, material disorder—especially that of the domestic variety—has come to stand alternately as evidence, symptom, and potential cause of mental disorder in the North American popular and psychiatric imagination. Sources ranging from the newly defined Hoarding Disorder diagnosis in the DSM-V, to popular media, to agents of the burgeoning clutter-management industry describe disorder in terms of an irrational attachment, closeness, or overidentification with objects. At the same time, these sources imagine order to result from the cool distance and controlled passion a person is able to maintain toward his or her possessions. Drawing on more than twenty interviews and numerous fieldwork encounters with professional organizers (POs) in Toronto between 2014 and 2015, this article describes how POs aim to reorient their clients materially, morally, and affectively to relieve the disorder they report in their lives. Here, I argue, POs emerge as a species of late capitalist healer whose interventions are animated by a paradoxical double movement. For just as POs act to loosen the object attachments and disrupt the “secret sympathy” their clients share with their possessions, they operate within a realm of magical correspondence where matter and mind are imagined to reflect and affect one another, and where bringing order to a client’s possessions means also bringing order to his or her mind.

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Television as a Hybrid Repertoire of Memory

VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture ◽

10.18146/2213-0969.2013.jethc032 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 2 (3) ◽

pp. 52 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Berber Hagedoorn

Keyword(s):

Cultural Memory ◽

New Model ◽

The Past ◽

Media Platform ◽

The Media ◽

Dynamic Production

In this article, television is reconsidered as a hybrid ‘repertoire’ ofmemory. It is demonstrated how new dynamic production and scheduling practicesin connection with highly accessible and participatory forms of user engagementoffer opportunities for television users to engage with the past, and how suchpractices affect television as a practice of memory. The media platform HollandDoc is discussed as a principal casestudy. By adopting and expanding Aleida Assmann’s model of the dynamics ofcultural memory between remembering and forgetting, a new model to studytelevision as cultural memory is proposed which represents the medium’shybridity in the multi-platform era.

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