Collecting And Historical Consciousness In Early Nineteenth Century Germany

Author : Susan A. Crane
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501723596
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany written by Susan A. Crane and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of historical consciousness in Germany. Susan A. Crane argues that the ever-more-elaborate preservation of the historical may actually reduce the likelihood that history can be experienced with the freshness and individuality characteristic of the early collectors and preservationists. Her book is both a study of the emergence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany of a distinctively modern conception of historical consciousness, and a meditation on what was lost as historical thought became institutionalized and professionalized. Public forms of remembering the past which are familiar today, such as historical museums and historical preservation, have surprisingly recent origins. In Germany, caring about the past took on these distinctively new forms after the Napoleonic wars. The Brothers Grimm gathered fairy tales and documented the origins of the German language. Historical preservationists collected documents and artifacts and organized the conservation of cathedrals and other historic buildings. Collectors formed historical societies and created Germany's historical museums. No single national consciousness emerged; instead, many groups used similar means to make different claims about what it meant to have a German past.Although individuals were responsible for stimulating new interest in the past, they chose to band together in voluntary associations to promote collective awareness of German history. In doing so, however, they clashed with academic and political interests and lost control over the very artifacts, collections, and buildings they had saved from ruin. Examining the letters and publications of the amateur collectors, Crane shows how historical consciousness came to be represented in collective terms—whether regional or national—and in effect robbed everyone of the capacity to experience history individually and spontaneously.

Author : Susan Crane
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781503613478
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nothing Happened written by Susan Crane and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense and meaning out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and see Nothing? This book redefines Nothing as a historical object and reorients historical consciousness in terms of an awareness of what has and has not been considered worth remembering. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting, not happening, all that we have skipped over or is just not there. It will take some (possibly considerable) mental adjustment before we can see Nothing in the way this author has come to think of it, with a capital N. But if we are to transform Nothing into a legitimate historical object, something that exists in the present and has existed in the past, we must see it that way. For Nothing has actually been there all along, in plain sight. When nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when nothing happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being disappointed when nothing happens-for instance, when a forecast end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup and recalibrate their predictions. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Visually driven, this book explores the ways that modern photographers, artists and writers have depicted ruins, emptiness, and a lack of action. It shows us how the perception that "nothing is the way it was" has produced images and art about memories. The book also analyzes such phenomena as fake historical markers that joke about how "On This Site Nothing Happened" to reflect on our everyday awareness that important events and places from the past be remembered. Most of all, it uncovers the mistake of taking Nothing for granted--because Nothing is happening all the time"--

Author : Susan A. Crane
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503614050
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nothing Happened written by Susan A. Crane and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating. When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.

Author : Humberto Beck
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812296443
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Moment of Rupture written by Humberto Beck and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-07-26 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, kairos, the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos, measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture, Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time. According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct "regime of historicity," a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

Author : Susan A. Crane
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474273505
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century written by Susan A. Crane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century comprises scholarly inquiry into representations of memory and historical cultures during the 'long nineteenth century'. In the era that invented photography, revised the history of the earth, and saw innovative communication and transportation technologies transform the experience of time and distance, both personal and collective memories were translated into new forms of expression. Material cultures of memory produced relics and souvenirs within institutions such as museums and archives dedicated to preservation, while commemorative practices expanded within both the private sphere and the growing public sphere, generating monuments and memorials while erasing other stories about the meaning of the past. Innovative writers and thinkers creatively engaged 'memory' in ways which continue to shape psychology, history and literature today. In this volume, thematic chapters survey representations of memory in power and politics; remembering and forgetting; time and space; media and technology; knowledge, science and education; high culture and popular culture; philosophy, religion and history; and rituals and faith practices in everyday life"--

Author : Vera Kaplan
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253024064
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Historians and Historical Societies in the Public Life of Imperial Russia written by Vera Kaplan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the role of historians and historical societies in the public life of imperial Russia? Focusing on the Society of Zealots of Russian Historical Education (1895–1918), Vera Kaplan analyzes the network of voluntary associations that existed in imperial Russia, showing how they interacted with state, public, and private bodies. Unlike most Russian voluntary associations of the late imperial period, the Zealots were conservative in their view of the world. Yet, like other history associations, the group conceived their educational mission broadly, engaging academic and amateur historians, supporting free public libraries, and widely disseminating the historical narrative embraced by the Society through periodicals. The Zealots were champions of voluntary association and admitted members without regard to social status, occupation, or gender. Kaplan's study affirms the existence of a more substantial civil society in late imperial Russia and one that could endorse a modernist program without an oppositional liberal agenda.

Author : Benedict Taylor
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139501364
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mendelssohn, Time and Memory written by Benedict Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Felix Mendelssohn has long been viewed as one of the most historically minded composers in western music. This book explores the conceptions of time, memory and history found in his instrumental compositions, presenting an intriguing new perspective on his ever-popular music. Focusing on Mendelssohn's innovative development of cyclic form, Taylor investigates how the composer was influenced by the aesthetic and philosophical movements of the period. This is of key importance not only for reconsideration of Mendelssohn's work and its position in nineteenth-century culture, but also more generally concerning the relationship between music, time and subjectivity. One of very few detailed accounts of Mendelssohn's music, the study presents a new and provocative reading of the meaning of the composer's work by connecting it to wider cultural and philosophical ideas.

Author : Samuel Frederick
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501761579
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Redemption of Things written by Samuel Frederick and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting is usually understood as an activity that bestows permanence, unity, and meaning on otherwise scattered and ephemeral objects. In The Redemption of Things, Samuel Frederick emphasizes that to collect things, however, always entails displacing, immobilizing, and potentially disfiguring them, too. He argues that the dispersal of objects, seemingly antithetical to the collector's task, is essential to the logic of gathering and preservation. Through analyses of collecting as a dialectical process of preservation and loss, The Redemption of Things illustrates this paradox by focusing on objects that challenge notions of collectability: ephemera, detritus, and trivialities such as moss, junk, paper scraps, dust, scent, and the transitory moment. In meticulous close readings of works by Gotthelf, Stifter, Keller, Rilke, Glauser, and Frisch, and by examining an experimental film by Oskar Fischinger, Frederick reveals how the difficulties posed by these fleeting, fragile, and forsaken objects help to reconceptualize collecting as a poetic activity that makes the world of scattered things uniquely palpable and knowable.

Author : Donald R. Kelley
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300128290
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fortunes of History written by Donald R. Kelley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the “long nineteenth century”—the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings. Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the “new histories” of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines.

Author : Mark Westgarth
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000050629
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815-1850 written by Mark Westgarth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than the customary focus on the activities of individual collectors, The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850: The Commodification of Historical Objects illuminates the less-studied roles played by dealers in the nineteenthcentury antique and curiosity markets. Set against the recent ‘art market turn’ in scholarly literature, this volume examines the role, activities, agency and influence of antique and curiosity dealers as they emerged in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. This study begins at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when dealers began their wholesale importations of historical objects; it closes during the 1850s, after which the trade became increasingly specialised, reflecting the rise of historical museums such as the South Kensington Museum (V&A). Focusing on the archive of the early nineteenth-century London dealer John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887), as well as drawing on a wide range of other archival and contextual material, Mark Westgarth considers the emergence of the dealer in relation to a broad historical and cultural landscape. The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer was part of the rapid economic, social, political and cultural change of early nineteenth-century Britain, centred around ideas of antiquarianism, the commercialisation of culture and a distinctive and evolving interest in historical objects. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, histories of collecting, museum and heritage studies and nineteenth-century culture.