Public Forgetting

Forgetting is usually juxtaposed with memory as its opposite in a negative way: it is seen as the loss of the ability to remember, or, ironically, as the inevitable process of distortion or dissolution that accompanies attempts to commemorate the past. The civic emphasis on the crucial importance of preserving lessons from the past to prevent us from repeating mistakes that led to violence and injustice, invoked most poignantly in the call of “Never again” from Holocaust survivors, tends to promote a view of forgetting as verging on sin or irresponsibility. In this book, Bradford Vivian hopes to put a much more positive spin on forgetting by elucidating its constitutive role in the formation and transformation of public memory. Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how, contrary to conventional wisdom, communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of their shared past.

Conducting interviews and collecting the opinions of Acadians, Anglophones, and First Nations, Rudin examines the variety of ways in which the past is publicly presented and remembered.

Throughout Canada, provincial, federal, and municipal archives exist to house the records we produce. Some conceive of these institutions as old and staid, suggesting that archives are somehow trapped in the past. But archives are more than resources for professional scholars and interested individuals. With an increasing emphasis on transparency in government and public institutions, archives have become essential tools for accountability. Better Off Forgetting? offers a reappraisal of archives and a look at the challenges they face in a time when issues of freedom of information, privacy, technology, and digitization are increasingly important. The contributors argue that archives are essential to contemporary debates about public policy and make a case for more status, funding, and influence within public bureaucracies. While stimulating debate about our rapidly changing information environment, Better Off Forgetting? focuses on the continuing role of archives in gathering and preserving our collective memory.

"Reconsiders the negative status attributed to forgetting in both academic and popular discussions of public memory. Demonstrates how a community may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of its shared past"--Provided by publisher.

"Robert Irwin, perhaps the most influential of the California artists, moved from his beginnings in abstract expressionism through successive shifts in style and sensibility, into a new aesthetic territory altogether, one where philosophical concepts of perception and the world interact. Weschler has charted the journey with exceptional clarity and cogency. He has also, in the process, provided what seems to me the best running history of postwar West Coast art that I have yet seen."—Calvin Tomkins

We live in a culture that prizes memory – how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear, but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and forgiveness? A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography and social criticism. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a philosophical and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil. Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.

Thanks to Facebook and Instagram, our younger selves have been captured and preserved online. But what happens, Kate Eichhorn asks, when we can’t leave our most embarrassing moments behind? Rather than a childhood cut short by a loss of innocence, the real crisis of the digital age may be the specter of a childhood that can never be forgotten.

Elite Romans periodically chose to limit or destroy the memory of a leading citizen who was deemed an unworthy member of the community. Sanctions against memory could lead to the removal or mutilation of portraits and public inscriptions. Harriet Flower provides the first chronological overview of the development of this Roman practice--an instruction to forget--from archaic times into the second century A.D. Flower explores Roman memory sanctions against the background of Greek and Hellenistic cultural influence and in the context of the wider Mediterranean world. Combining literary texts, inscriptions, coins, and material evidence, this richly illustrated study contributes to a deeper understanding of Roman political culture.