The nature of history.

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processe of memory nonplus special problems for postmodern contemplation While postmodern and poststructuralist notion have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as entirely engaged with the question of in what way to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century consideration are the questions of for what reason we remember and what is returned as history amid an understanding of the part played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms by the and of which we mediate our histories, the two personal and cultural.

If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form between the walls of which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no similar easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the part of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its most numerous symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that "To write verse after Auschwitz is barbaric"(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as the one and the other shock and death, in which he asks "Is History not simply that time when we were not born?"(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation to [i]or[/i] at a great depth problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work forward the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory.

Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing [i]or[/i] part of to the other Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught from History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each propound complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms like as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic main division s as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's terminus the "imaginary," specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is bear uponed with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means by the and of which the past, including the traumatic adventures of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed.

Hirsch uses the space of time "postmemory" as a means to understand the complexities not simply of the memories of the children of survivors, if it were not that the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is

distinguished from memory by means of generational distance and from history according to deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and remarkably particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its purpose or source is mediated not from one side recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who advance up dominated by narratives that preced their birth, whose possess belated stories are evacuated by means of the stories of the previous generation shaped by way of traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.

Postmemory is about the continuation of memory and its regeneration in those for whom memories are experienced one time or twice removed. Liss, who also intrust with an agencys the term, uses it to appertain to "the artists' distance from the facts as well as their relation to the fallout of the experiences." It could be said that these authors diocese artistic engagements of postmemory as offering compelling means to reexamine not and nothing else the ways in which the past is understood, set forthed and mediated, but to reconsider the past itself.

While the question of the incommunicability of new experience and representation was frequently posed by modernism, albeit with the assumption that in the same state [i]or[/i] condition communication and representation were still possible goals, the Holocaust as an fact forced a dramatic shift in notions of what is representable and communicable. Walter Benjamin wrote mournfully of the imports of the mechanical terror of World War I onward the capacity to tell stories or to contribute an experience communicable precisely because of the fathomless change that war caused in the European experience of modernity - from undivided of optimism to one of terror and destruction.(3) over and above it is the Holocaust that has been largely understood in western conception as the primary event for which representation is always inadequate or impossible. This has been debated extensively, in particular its relationship to other traumatic issues and genocides of the twentieth centenary yet it seems clear that the horror of this adventure with its industrialization of death, marks a shift in the Euro-American world view, undivided that can be characterized as a questioning of modernist opinions precisely because of the inconceivable nature of its death and destruction. Hence the Holocaust has been seen as a topic too volatile, too sacred and too unimaginable, its representations control to stringent moral codes. to what degree then can we interpret the immense outpouring of works in literature, art and popular tillage that have attempted to make intellect of this event, of the brutality, the obliteration of whole communities, the bureaucratization of death and the capacity to survive? by what mode can we deal with Adorno's statement that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry? the same could read it as profoundly disabling in that it contributes all attempts at interpretation of the Holocaust as suspicious. nevertheless one can also see by what means this statement forced an examination of the question of representation in general and helped lead to a suit for new, non-modernist forms of engagement with history and memory.