Lessons from the Past?: Memory, Narrativity and Subjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

This book reconstructs how claims to know æthe lessonsÆ from past wrongdoings are made useful in the present. These claims are powerful tools in contemporary debates over who we are, who we want to be and what we should do. Drawing on a wide range of spoken and written texts from Austria, Denmark, Germany and the United States, this book proposes an abstract framework through which such claims can be understood. It does so by conceptualising four rhetorics of learning and how each of them links memories of past wrongdoings to opposition to present and future wrongdoings. Drawing extensively on narrative theory, Lessons from the Past? reconstructs how links between past, present and future can be narrativised, thus helping to understand the subjectivities and feelings that these stories facilitate. The book closes by considering if and how such rhetorics might live up to their promise to know æthe lessonsÆ and to enable learning, offering a revised theory of collective learning processes.

• | Author: Bernhard Forchtner
• | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Nov 28, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 243 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Social Science
• | ISBN-10: 1137483210
• | ISBN-13: 9781137483218