The Importance Of Memory

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“A strange thing is memory, and hope one looks backward, and the other forward one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day” (Moses). Memory has changed and is not what it used to be. It was thought to be anchored in certain places, “to be lodged in particular containers (monuments, texts, geographical locations), and to belong to the (national, familial, social) communities it helped to acquire a sense of historical continuity, memory has, in the last few years, increasingly been considered a fluid and flexible affair” (Bond et al. 1). Due to the globalised age, memories are able to travel across and along the migratory ways of world citizens.…show more content…
More and more, memory is considered to be a process, comparable to work that is always in progress, rather than as a reified object. During the last years, the transnational or transcultural circulation of memories has received a lot of attention. Accompanying this, there has been a perceptible rise of interest in how memory can travel between different media, especially in digital media in the preservation, production, and transfer of memories. Furthermore, as the Holocaust slowly begins to fade out of the living memory, “the question of how memories of survivors of historical traumas are transmitted to, and inherited by, members of later generations has become another area of intense inquiry” (1). Finally, it appears that memory studies are moving “toward a greater interdisciplinary or, at least, enhanced awareness of the necessity or desirability of cross-fertilization between memory research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences”…show more content…
The theoretical part provides a foundation of environmental memory and depicts it in contrast to the fact that nature is not an inexhaustible resource that humans can plunder of/from forever (Hussey and Thompson 1), without facing the consequences. These theoretical insights are needed for the analysis part to examine two different movies, first James Cameron’s Avatar, and secondly Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E, regarding their depiction of environmental memory. Providing the opportunity to depict that films can be used as transmitters to show a possible reality, this paper will attempt to demonstrate the representation of catastrophic, cultural, social, and environmental effects on planet earth as seen in Avatar and

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