AustLit

In recent years ideas about memory, individual and cultural, have been taken up enthusiastically, both within the academe and popular culture. From Homi Bhaha's "On Global Memory' to successful movies thematising crises in personal memory such as Memento, we do appear to be in the midst of a "memory boom'. Recently, the crucial importance of media and communications has been acknowledged by the field of memory studies. Scholars have in particular begun to analyse the roles played by literature, film and television in memory construction, transmission and circulation. Likewise memory studies is fortuitously moving away from conceptions of memory as a static object and has begun to examine remembrance in terms of perfomativity and process. To better understand how a culture remembers, and how memories are forged by and within cultural products, it is useful to examine how particular cultural memories form, and develop over time across media texts, always involving intricate relationships between past and present.' Source: Laura Basu.