at Andrea Liss Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres 1998 152 pp/$2200 (sb) The nature of history.

at Andrea Liss Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres 1998 152 pp/$2200 (sb)

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processe of memory bewilder special problems for postmodern meditation While postmodern and poststructuralist consideration have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as greatly engaged with the question of to what degree to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century cogitation are the questions of to what extent we remember and what is supplyed 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 in consequence 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 sides of which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no as it was 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 mostly 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 couple 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 profoundly 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 onward 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 end Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught on History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each tender 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 similar as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic works 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 mete the "imaginary," specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is make anxioused with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means by the agency of which the past, including the traumatic adventures of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed.

Hirsch uses the expression "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 by way of deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and self-same particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its goal or source is mediated not between the walls of recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who put forth up dominated by narratives that preced their birth, whose be in possession of belated stories are evacuated on the stories of the previous generation shaped by dint 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 formerly or twice removed. Liss, who also give employment tos the term, uses it to leave to "the artists' distance from the terminations as well as their relation to the fallout of the experiences." It could be said that these authors descry artistic engagements of postmemory as offering compelling means to reexamine not no other than the ways in which the past is understood, exhibited and mediated, but to reconsider the past itself.

While the question of the incommunicability of new experience and representation was oftentimes posed by modernism, albeit with the assumption that as it is communication and representation were still possible goals, the Holocaust as an conclusion 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 in succession the capacity to tell stories or to return an experience communicable precisely because of the deep change that war caused in the European experience of modernity - from common of optimism to one of terror and destruction.(3) to this time it is the Holocaust that has been largely understood in western notion as the primary event for which representation is always inadequate or impossible. This has been debated extensively, in particular its relationship to other traumatic affairs and genocides of the twentieth centenary yet it seems clear that the horror of this circumstance with its industrialization of death, marks a shift in the Euro-American world view, single in kind 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 enslave to stringent moral codes. to what extent then can we interpret the immense outpouring of works in literature, art and popular cultivation that have attempted to make thinking principle of this event, of the brutality, the obliteration of whole communities, the bureaucratization of death and the capacity to survive? in what way can we deal with Adorno's statement that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry? undivided could read it as profoundly disabling in that it presents all attempts at interpretation of the Holocaust as suspicious. in addition one can also see by what mode 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.