War, divided the American society for decades. Until today the memory of the war still haunts the American conscience. Thus, the purpose of the essay is to examine the significance of the Vietnam War as a collective memory in the American society. Specifically, the main focus will be on how the remembrance of the Vietnam
What is social memory and how can it be legitimized? Paul Connerton’s study on How Societies Remember revolves around this question and answers it through psychological and political means. Many authors and historians give their intelligent opinions on how social memory is collected and portrayed, however the focus here is to present Connerton’s outlook towards memory recollection and state his appropriate reasoning for it. Connerton’s attitude towards collective memory is that people in a social
previously garnered little, if any, interest among people became elevated to the status of a national monument, albeit unofficially, in the face of demolition. Nostalgia was enhanced even further when the national library building was seen as a site of memory due to its material, functional and symbolic aspects in Singapore society (Nora, 1996). People saw it as Singapore’s first major educational institution and thus, this perspective did not only just highlight its material and functional aspects but
world possible, but have also changed the way we think and how we use our brains”. (160) The metaphor, “memory palace” used by Foer, as well as Simonides, is rather very well suitable. The term, although not created by Foer himself, reaches a great sense that our brains must ponder to understand. When one reads or looks at a certain picture, text, or even a song, it becomes committed to memory.
For centuries philosophers have grappled with this concept of self, what is the self, what is the self in relation to the world and how do we define personal identity. In 1960 ‘in an essay concerning human understanding’ John Locke proposed that one’s personal identity is directly related to their own consciousness. It is important to have a clear definition of what we refer to as identity. For many philosophers it is generally agreed that identity refers to identity being one thing and not another
In his attempt to arrive at the foundation of religion, i.e. the basic constituents of every religion, Emile Durkheim studies the Australian cults in terms of beliefs, practices and collective behavior. According to Durkheim, these Australian tribes are primitive societies that, therefore, are easy to examine and to arrive at a conclusion from such examination. A tone of arrogance is felt here in the choice of the sample and the description mentioned but it is quite understandable in the
dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer,” Danticat states in the opening chapter. This tension between the liberating potential of art and the oppressive power of dictatorship is a theme that emerges in several of Danticat’s essays. Reflecting on execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, two guerilla
Introduction Michael Haneke’s film Caché/Hidden (2005) has provoked endless debates since the first day when it came out in 2005. The audiences leave the theatre jolted and subsequently keep thinking for days due to its ambiguous narrative construction (Cousins, 2007). Based on the surface reading of the plot, it is a thriller contains a mixture of domestic contradictions, amnesia and the mistrust between middle class and lower class. A French bourgeois family living in the cosy suburb of Paris
are comparatively privileged due to economic stature and race. This analysis will compare the Native American and Asian American assimilation experiences, noting similarities and differences to elucidate wages of (honorary) whiteness. Moreover, this essay maintains racial/ethnic groups only assimilate to certain degrees; the question remains, at which points are assimilation boundaries drawn and how does this vary across race
Based on the death of subject and the impossibility of parody, the notion of pastiche, however, arouses the question about the boundary: to what extent and in what context can the hypothesis function? Using The Longest Nite (1998) as an example, this essay will try to evaluate to what extent a postmodern movie can or cannot fit into Jameson’s definition of pastiche and nostalgia film; and thus, in the other way around, to what degree pastiche can be regarded as a common feature of postmodern texts.