The Memory Of Place

From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world. Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies. Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”

From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world. Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies. Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”

As Ruskin suggests in his Seven Lamps of Architecture: "We may live without [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her." We remember best when we experience an event in a place. But what happens when we leave that place, or that place no longer exists? This book addresses the relationship between memory and place and asks how architecture captures and triggers memory. It explores how architecture exists as a material object and how it registers as a place that we come to remember beyond the physical site itself. It questions what architecture is in the broadest sense, assuming that it is not simply buildings. Rather, architecture is considered to be the mapping of physical, mental or emotional space. The idea that we are all architects in some measure - as we actively organize and select pathways and markers within space - is central to this book's premise. Each chapter provides a different example of the manifold ways in which the physical place of architecture is curated by the architecture in our "mental" space: our imaginary toolbox when we think of a place and look at a photograph, or visit a site and describe it later or send a postcard. By connecting architecture with other disciplines such as geography, visual culture, sociology, and urban studies, as well as the fine and performing arts, this book puts forward the idea that a conversation about architecture is not exclusively about formal, isolated buildings, but instead must be deepened and broadened as spatialized visualizations and experiences of place.

Places are imagined, made, claimed, fought for and defended, and always in a state of becoming. This important book explores the historical and theoretical relationships among place, community, and public memory across differing chronologies and geographies within twentieth-century Canada. It is a collaborative work that shifts the focus from nation and empire to local places sitting at the intersection of public memory making and identity formation � main streets, city squares and village museums, internment camps, industrial wastelands, and the landscape itself. With a focus on the materiality of image, text, and artefact, the essays gathered here argue that every act of memory making is simultaneously an act of forgetting; every place memorialized is accompanied by places forgotten.

This Handbook explores the latest cross-disciplinary research on the inter-relationship between memory studies, place, and identity. In the works of dynamic memory, there is room for multiple stories, versions of the past and place understandings, and often resistance to mainstream narratives. Places may live on long after their physical destruction. This collection provides insights into the significant and diverse role memory plays in our understanding of the world around us, in a variety of spaces and temporalities, and through a variety of disciplinary and professional lenses. Many of the chapters in this Handbook explore place-making, its significance in everyday lives, and its loss. Processes of displacement, where people’s place attachments are violently torn asunder, are also considered. Ranging from oral history to forensic anthropology, from folklore studies to cultural geographies and beyond, the chapters in this Handbook reveal multiple and often unexpected facets of the fascinating relationship between place and memory, from the individual to the collective. This is a multi- and intra-disciplinary collection of the latest, most influential approaches to the interwoven and dynamic issues of place and memory. It will be of great use to researchers and academics working across Geography, Tourism, Heritage, Anthropology, Memory Studies, and Archaeology.

This book bridges theoretical gaps that exist between the meta-concepts of memory, place and identity by positioning its lens on the emplaced practices of commemoration and the remembrance of war and conflict. This book examines how diverse publics relate to their wartime histories through engagements with everyday collective memories, in differing places. Specifically addressing questions of place-making, displacement and identity, contributions shed new light on the processes of commemoration of war in everyday urban façades and within generations of families and national communities. Contributions seek to clarify how we connect with memories and places of war and conflict. The spatial and narrative manifestations of attempts to contextualise wartime memories of loss, trauma, conflict, victory and suffering are refracted through the roles played by emotion and identity construction in the shaping of post-war remembrances. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, with insights from history, memory studies, social psychology, cultural and urban geography, to contextualise memories of war and their ‘use’ by national governments, perpetrators, victims and in family histories.

This book is a phenomenological investigation of the interrelations of tradition, memory, place and the body. Drawing upon philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, Janet Donohoe uses the idea of a palimpsest to argue that layers of the past are carried along as traditions, through places and bodies, such that we can speak of memory as being written upon place and place as being written upon memory. In dialogue with theorists such as Jeff Malpas and Ed Casey, Donohoe focuses on analysis of monuments and memorials to investigate how such deliberate places of collective memory can be ideological, or can open us to the past and different traditions. The insights in this book will be of particular value to place theorists and phenomenologists in disciplines such as philosophy, geography, memory studies, public history, and environmental studies.

Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB American Book Award winner