Leo Spitzer

Bio: Leo Spitzer is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Recall & Cultural memory. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 413 citations.

Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present

Abstract: Acts of Memory presents 15 tightly integrated essays that illustrate the active role of individual and cultural memory in tying the past to the present. Memory, or memorialization, is a cultural activity occurring in the present that offers history another kind of source or document; one that provides insights into the past as it lives on today. The authors, in fields ranging from philosophy and history through literature and media studies, illustrate how memory serves many purposes, between conscious recall and unreflected re-emergence, between nostalgic longing for what is lost to polemical use of the past to reshape the present. Their essays coalesce around three topics: the need for memory and testimonial facilitation of memory, primarily in the case of historical and individual trauma; the site-specific nature of acts of memory, especially in geopolitically conflicted situations; and the potential contributions of acts of memory when facing the difficulties and needs of the present. "Neither remnant, document, nor relic of the past, nor floating in a present cut off from the past, cultural memory, for better or worse, binds the past to the present and future. It is that process of binding that we explore in this volume" writes Mieke Bal. CONTRIBUTORS: Carol B. Bardenstein, Susan J. Brison, Ann Burlein, Katharine Conley, Lessie Jo Frazier, Gerd Gemunden, Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen, Irene Kacandes, Mary Kelley, Marita Sturken, Ernst van Alphen, and the editors"

The Generation of Postmemory

Abstract: Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to power- ful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were never- theless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance. The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second genera- tion is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is being transmuted into history, or into myth. It is also the generation in which we can think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living

Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory

Abstract: “One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July . Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life— ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead, something is still crying.”1

Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things

Abstract: The degradation of cultural artefacts is usually understood in a purely negative vein: the erosion of physical integrity is associated with a parallel loss of cultural information. This article asks if it is possible to adopt an interpretive approach in which entropic processes of decomposition and decay, though implicated in the destruction of cultural memory traces on one register, contribute to the recovery of memory on another register. The article tracks the entanglement of cultural and natural histories through the residual material culture of a derelict homestead in Montana. In conclusion, the article suggests that deposits of degraded material, though inappropriate for recovery in conventional conservation strategies, may be understood through the application of a collaborative interpretive ethic, allowing other-than-human agencies to participate in the telling of stories about particular places.

The Past in the Present Culture and the Transmission of Memory

Abstract: The aim of this article is to outline a theory cultural trauma, with reference to slavery and the formation of an African American identity. With this in mind, the concepts 'collective memory' and 'collective identity' are discussed and linked with a theory of intellectual generations. It is proposed that the notion of an 'African American' emerged as part of the efforts of a generation of black intellectuals to come to grips with their, individual and collective, rejection by American society after being promised full integration following the end of the Civil War (1861-5). Slavery, not so much as experience, but as a form of memory, was a focal point of reference in this process.

Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction

Abstract: T he cover image for this volume, “Self Portrait (Ellis Island),” evokes several of the issues and assumptions suggested by the relationship between cultural memory and gender. Produced in 1988 by the U.S. photographer Lorie Novak, the image is a projection: a photograph of a slide of a woman’s face floating in an empty room with peeling plaster walls, an open door, and a rough earthen floor. The woman’s head is bifurcated at the point where floor and wall meet. The face fades into the doorway and the hall behind it; the color of her skin merges into the earthen tones of the floor; the dark curly hair disappears into the ceiling. Pushed back to the two sides of the room, the carpet becomes an asymmetrical décolletage, creating the illusion that the room and her chest are one and that to walk into the room is to have access to the interiority of the person. The caption tells us that this is a self-portrait: the head is a photograph of the photographer. Although in the image the self of the portrait mysteriously hovers in space, the title firmly situates her in a particular place, Ellis Island, where generations of immigrants and refugees from Europe first entered the United States. “Self Portrait (Ellis Island)”—the two terms are parenthetically related, as though Ellis Island qualifies the notion of “self,” or of “portrait.” The image is at once a portrait of Ellis Island and a self-portrait in Ellis Island. The relationship among these terms is as ambiguous as the situation of the artist’s body and head in the space she does not quite inhabit: she is both photographer and subject of the image, both behind the lens and in front of it, both in the Ellis Island space and elsewhere. The image is