What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Svetlana Boym opens up a new avenue of inquiry: the study of nostalgia. Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his ...
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What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Svetlana Boym opens up a new avenue of inquiry: the study of nostalgia. Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities-St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.
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Add this copy of The Future of Nostalgia to cart. $93.88, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Basic Books.
This book takes the discussions of heritage versus history opened up by David Lowenthal, the ruminations on collective memory theorized by Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora and synthesizes one of the most compelling and useful analyses of nostalgia, memory politics and restoration/reconstruction in recent memory. While reliant on the singular experience of the post-Soviets, Blom moves effortlessly through Western European and American culture. I found the overall discussions more compelling than some of the individual examples.
