Memory as Foreground, Journalism as Background
Memory as Foreground, Journalism as Background
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记忆为前景，新闻为背景
DOI：
10.1057/9781137263940_3
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发表时间：
2014
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
B. Zelizer
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
B. Zelizer
regularly and systematically looks backward in reporting about the present, its engagement with the past has gone unnoticed in discussions of memory. From writing about the arts of memory in ancient Greece and Rome all the way through scholarship on contemporary digital memory systems, journalism constitutes an afterthought. This neglect has had multiple points of origin. They include uneven and changing understandings of the relationship between past and present, tensions over the kind of record that memory produces, and anxiety over the changing status of both journalism and memory in largely Western notions of modernity. Central too have been disciplinary alliances that force certain patterns of intellectual sharing, by which memory studies has focused on agents of memory other than journalism and journalism studies has emphasized the role that journalism plays in recording the present, not the past. Taken together, these circumstances have produced a deep hole in memory scholarship, through which the value of the connection between journalism and memory has fundamentally vanished.The patterning of this uneven relationship emerges with particular clarity when surveying the intellectual conversations about memory that have surfaced over time, primarily in the West. Invoked here as part of a strategic exercise to elucidate notions that have been so tightly packed into longstanding intellectual discussions that they seem to have disappeared, it provides a heuristic for unpacking how and when journalism went backstage in discussions of memory and why that never changed. Four main stages of memory scholarship are illustrative in this regard. Though strategically selected and by no means reflective of all the vagaries in memory’s intellectual work or the geographic singularities in journalism’s spread, these stages–two of which reflect writings after the fact, two of which address writings during the period–provide a useful lens on how ideas of memory have sidestepped journalism’s presence. 1 Briefly, the chapter argues that these stages developed as follows. Discussions of the earliest forms of memory produced rich ideas about how memory worked, but journalism constituted a mere shadow to then popular currents of thought. When memory took a downswing during the evidentiary environment that came with modernity and the Enlightenment, memory and journalism were constituted as stark alternatives: journalism embodied modernity’s promise, memory modernity’s peril. In the foundational period, when ideas about collective memory accompanied notions of individual recall, journalism was positioned as the past’s possible facilitator but remained vaguely relevant to its development. And finally, the contemporary period, with its increasing emphasis
