Saga - 2014, Side 88

gestkomandi í félagsvísindum og menntavísindum, t.d. í kennslu-
bókarannsóknum.67
Í flóði rita og fræða sker ein sig úr vegna umfangs, djúphygli og
listrænnar framsetningar, þó að torskilin sé á köflum. Það er bókin
Minni, saga, gleymska eftir franska heimspekinginn Paul Ricœur,
síðasta stórvirki hans, sem út kom árið 2000. Nokkur tækifæri hafa
gefist hér til að kalla rit hans til vitnis og verða fleiri í næstu grein.
Abstract
þor s te inn helgason
INDIvIDUAL AND SoCIAL MeMoRIeS
Are we capable of borrowing and assimilating the memories of others, not only
those of our nearest relatives and emotional connections but also of totally
unrelated figures in the contemporary media? Might treating memories through
documentation, correction and arrangement render them stale and dead? or
might a historian counter this by siding or identifying with memories, learning
from and even debating with them?
This article discusses remembrance and memory with reference to their
applications in academic discourse, particularly over the past few decades. Here,
memory is mainly comprehended as a social and cultural phenomenon, firstly by
scrutinizing individual memory and its psychological effects. other topics include
fictive and prosthetic memory, the shaping of individual memory by a variety of
forces, and the transfer and internalisation of memory by later generations or across
close communities. Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, krzysztof Pomian, Alison
Landsberg and Maurice Bloch are some of the theorists behind such analysis.
The concept of collective memory is most often traced to the writings of
Halbwachs which were published in the 1950s. He focused on the identity, know -
ledge and views shared by groups other than nations, since he considered the latter
to be the object of history. History, he felt, takes over where tradition ends and social
memory is abandoned. Nora, who took up Halbwachs’s torch around 1970, agreed:
history is portrayed as a secular, analytical and critical discourse, whereas memory
operates in a sacred domain. The article goes on to present the differing views on the
relationship of individual memory, collective memory and history which are seen in
the theories of Jan and Aleida Assmann and Jay Winter. While they both stress
reciprocity, Assmann’s model of cultural memory involves events, texts and tangible
structures that may become dormant but can be revived when a memory is activated.
Finally, memory studies by Icelandic historians are addressed; these have for
instance dealt with places of memory, national heroes, the 17th-century pirate raid
and, especially in literature, the Second World War.
þorsteinn helgason86
67 Þorsteinn Helgason, „verkfæri þjóðminninga: Tyrkjaránið í kennslubókun um“,
Netla 7. október (2014), netla.hi.is/greinar/2014/rym/004.pdf.
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