Jeffrey K Olick
Biographic Data
| ID | 77461 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey K Olick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey K |
| FAMILY NAME | Olick |
| SIGNATURE | OLICK J K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1152 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Introduction
An international, interdisciplinary, online graduate seminar in memory studies
The Future of the Mnemonic Turn
Observing the efflorescence of scholarly and public discourse about memory and commemoration since about the 1970s, historians and others have expressed concerns about "the memory boom" and "the memory industry." Referring instead, and less negatively, to "the mnemonic turn," this article responds to those concerns. It shows that many critiques were based on a Manichean distinction between "history" and "memory"-and between "historiography" and "…
Memory and Crisis
Keywords Crisis, democracy, memory, politics of commemoration, states of emergency, American Exceptionalism
What we talk about when we talk about culture
Between Trauma and Tragedy
Social science is parasitical on the world it studies, reconfiguring familiar terms for analytical purposes. This is clear in the history of trauma, which began as a label for physical injury and evolved into a description of psychological suffering. How does social scientists’ embrace of the trauma framework—which bears the marks of its origins in medicine—influence assumptions about the social world we purport to understand and explain? We comp…
Pamięć gatunkowa i gatunki pamięci
Antologia przekładów kilkudziesięciu tekstów dotyczących rozmaitych aspektów badań nad pamięcią. Redaktorzy i tłumacze dobrali je w taki sposób, by publikacja w pełni odzwierciedlała różnorodność zagadnień podejmowanych w ramach memory studies.
The Memory Studies Association
The Sins of the Fathers
The poverty of resilience
Along with risk and trauma, resilience and well-being are key terms for understanding and responding to disaster and suffering in the contemporary world. This article not only explores how memory can be brought into the discourse of post-disaster resilience but also critiques the very language of resilience and well-being as part of an ideological cluster with problematic implications. Resilience is a peculiarly modern form of theodicy, an explan…
The Security of Silence“ or „Tacit Consent“
Schweigen
Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen« – so Wittgensteins berühmtes Diktum. Gewöhnlich fasst man das »Worüber« des Schweigens im mystischen Sinne auf: als das, was jenseits des menschlichem Erkennen Zugänglichen und mit sprachlichen Mitteln Artikulierbaren liegt. Man kann aber auch an das Jenseits des Kommunizierbaren denken, was durchaus erkennbar ist, aber sich jeder Mitteilung versperrt: weil es niemand gern hören, weil es der…
The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory
Group Experiment and Other Writings
Between Chaos and Diversity
From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products
The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory
Jeffrey K. Olick The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory: NeoFreudian Impressions In the group too an im pression of the past is retained in unconscious memory-traces. —Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism S i n c e b e n e d i c t a n d e r s o n f i r s t p u b l i s h e d h i s l a n d m a r k Imagined Communities in 1991, scholars have alm ost ritualistically followed Anderson in quoting the nineteenth-centuiy French philoso pher Ernst Ren…
Collective memory
This article reflects on the past, present and future states of social memory studies. Despite the proliferation of work employing the term `collective memory', the field retains the `non-paradigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless' qualities identified in 1998. As a result, this essay celebrates the appearance of Memory Studies along with a number of other endeavors promising systematization and institutionalization in the vast literature on soc…
Collective Memory and Nonpublic Opinion
This article describes a little‐known moment in the history of social research, the so‐called Group Experiment (Gruppenexperiment) conducted in Germany in 1950–51 by members of the reconstituted Frankfurt school. That research, I argue, provides a missing link in the history of the ideas of deliberative democracy and public discourse, areas of political theory in which the substantive legacies of pragmatism and interactionism are particularly sig…
States of Memory
States of Memory
What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?
The Guilt of Nations
“What responsibility do ordinary people bear for atrocities committed in their names? According to modern democratic sensibilities, responsibility is an individual affair. The idea, as in Exodus (20:5), that the sins of the fathers could be delivered unto the third and fourth generations goes against the grain. It seems to be part of the collectivistic thinking that characterizes modernity off its rails, a pre-modern remain that produces outburst…
The Norbert Elias Reader
Genre Memories and Memory Genres
Commemorative images of the past not only reflect the commemorated event and the contemporary circumstances, but are path-dependent products of earlier commemorations as well. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, I specify the central mechanism of this path-dependency-genre memory-and reconceptualize commemoration dialogically. In a case study of May 8, 1945 anniversaries in the Federal Republic of Germany, I take an integrated approach that i…
Social Memory Studies
Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, o…
Collective Memory
What is collective about collective memory? Two different concepts of collective memory compete-one refers to the aggregation of socially framed individual memories and one refers to collective phenomena sui generis-though the difference is rarely articulated in the literature. This article theorizes the differences and relations between individualist and collectivist understandings of collective memory. The former are open to psychological consi…
Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint
Genre Memories and Memory Genres
Commemorative images of the past not only reflect the commemorated event and the contemporary circumstances, but are path-dependent products of earlier commemorations as well. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, I specify the central mechanism of this path-dependency-genre memory-and reconceptualize commemoration dialogically. In a case study of May 8, 1945 anniversaries in the Federal Republic of Germany, I take an integrated approach that i…
An epistemology for the futures field
Collective memory
This article reflects on the past, present and future states of social memory studies. Despite the proliferation of work employing the term `collective memory', the field retains the `non-paradigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless' qualities identified in 1998. As a result, this essay celebrates the appearance of Memory Studies along with a number of other endeavors promising systematization and institutionalization in the vast literature on soc…
The Guilt of Nations
“What responsibility do ordinary people bear for atrocities committed in their names? According to modern democratic sensibilities, responsibility is an individual affair. The idea, as in Exodus (20:5), that the sins of the fathers could be delivered unto the third and fourth generations goes against the grain. It seems to be part of the collectivistic thinking that characterizes modernity off its rails, a pre-modern remain that produces outburst…
What we talk about when we talk about culture
Introduction
Jeffrey K. Olick, Introduction: Memory and the Nation: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations, Social Science History, Vol. 22, No. 4, Special Issue: Memory and the Nation (Winter, 1998), pp. 377-387
The poverty of resilience
Along with risk and trauma, resilience and well-being are key terms for understanding and responding to disaster and suffering in the contemporary world. This article not only explores how memory can be brought into the discourse of post-disaster resilience but also critiques the very language of resilience and well-being as part of an ideological cluster with problematic implications. Resilience is a peculiarly modern form of theodicy, an explan…
Memory and Crisis
Keywords Crisis, democracy, memory, politics of commemoration, states of emergency, American Exceptionalism
The Memory Studies Association
What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past
In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” {Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?). Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” ( Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit? ), Adorno’s lecture takes issue…
Between Trauma and Tragedy
Social science is parasitical on the world it studies, reconfiguring familiar terms for analytical purposes. This is clear in the history of trauma, which began as a label for physical injury and evolved into a description of psychological suffering. How does social scientists’ embrace of the trauma framework—which bears the marks of its origins in medicine—influence assumptions about the social world we purport to understand and explain? We comp…
Schweigen
Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen« – so Wittgensteins berühmtes Diktum. Gewöhnlich fasst man das »Worüber« des Schweigens im mystischen Sinne auf: als das, was jenseits des menschlichem Erkennen Zugänglichen und mit sprachlichen Mitteln Artikulierbaren liegt. Man kann aber auch an das Jenseits des Kommunizierbaren denken, was durchaus erkennbar ist, aber sich jeder Mitteilung versperrt: weil es niemand gern hören, weil es der…
Between Chaos and Diversity
Collective Memory and Nonpublic Opinion
This article describes a little‐known moment in the history of social research, the so‐called Group Experiment (Gruppenexperiment) conducted in Germany in 1950–51 by members of the reconstituted Frankfurt school. That research, I argue, provides a missing link in the history of the ideas of deliberative democracy and public discourse, areas of political theory in which the substantive legacies of pragmatism and interactionism are particularly sig…
What Does It Mean to Normalize the past? Official Memory in German Politics since 1989
Jeffrey K. Olick, What Does It Mean to Normalize the past? Official Memory in German Politics since 1989, Social Science History, Vol. 22, No. 4, Special Issue: Memory and the Nation (Winter, 1998), pp. 547-571
Introduction
The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory
Jeffrey K. Olick The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory: NeoFreudian Impressions In the group too an im pression of the past is retained in unconscious memory-traces. —Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism S i n c e b e n e d i c t a n d e r s o n f i r s t p u b l i s h e d h i s l a n d m a r k Imagined Communities in 1991, scholars have alm ost ritualistically followed Anderson in quoting the nineteenth-centuiy French philoso pher Ernst Ren…
Introduction
Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars and politicians alike have recognized the fundamental connection between memory and the nation. While political elites invented and propagated legitimating traditions, historians objectified the nation as a unitary entity with a linear descent. At the same time, critics like Ernest Renan pointed out that forgetting—that is, forgetting alternative possible stories and alternate possible identificatio…
An epistemology for the futures field
Retooling Critical Theory
Mass Rape
How is one to explain the sudden reappearance of genocide on European soil less than a half century after the Nazi Holocaust and after three gen-erations of Europeans and Americans had come of age accepting the motto 'never again'?-Roy Gutman, author of A Witness to Genocide. Alexandra Stiglmayer interviewed survivors of the continuing war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to reveal, to a seemingly deaf world, the horrors of the ongoing war in the f…
Frames of Remembrance
Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint
Tangled Memories
Introduction
Jeffrey K. Olick, Introduction: Memory and the Nation: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations, Social Science History, Vol. 22, No. 4, Special Issue: Memory and the Nation (Winter, 1998), pp. 377-387
What Does It Mean to Normalize the past? Official Memory in German Politics since 1989
Jeffrey K. Olick, What Does It Mean to Normalize the past? Official Memory in German Politics since 1989, Social Science History, Vol. 22, No. 4, Special Issue: Memory and the Nation (Winter, 1998), pp. 547-571
Introduction
Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars and politicians alike have recognized the fundamental connection between memory and the nation. While political elites invented and propagated legitimating traditions, historians objectified the nation as a unitary entity with a linear descent. At the same time, critics like Ernest Renan pointed out that forgetting—that is, forgetting alternative possible stories and alternate possible identificatio…
What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past
In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” {Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?). Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” ( Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit? ), Adorno’s lecture takes issue…
Social Memory Studies
Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, o…
The Norbert Elias Reader
Genre Memories and Memory Genres
Commemorative images of the past not only reflect the commemorated event and the contemporary circumstances, but are path-dependent products of earlier commemorations as well. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, I specify the central mechanism of this path-dependency-genre memory-and reconceptualize commemoration dialogically. In a case study of May 8, 1945 anniversaries in the Federal Republic of Germany, I take an integrated approach that i…
Collective Memory
What is collective about collective memory? Two different concepts of collective memory compete-one refers to the aggregation of socially framed individual memories and one refers to collective phenomena sui generis-though the difference is rarely articulated in the literature. This article theorizes the differences and relations between individualist and collectivist understandings of collective memory. The former are open to psychological consi…
States of Memory
States of Memory
What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?
The Guilt of Nations
“What responsibility do ordinary people bear for atrocities committed in their names? According to modern democratic sensibilities, responsibility is an individual affair. The idea, as in Exodus (20:5), that the sins of the fathers could be delivered unto the third and fourth generations goes against the grain. It seems to be part of the collectivistic thinking that characterizes modernity off its rails, a pre-modern remain that produces outburst…
Collective memory
This article reflects on the past, present and future states of social memory studies. Despite the proliferation of work employing the term `collective memory', the field retains the `non-paradigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless' qualities identified in 1998. As a result, this essay celebrates the appearance of Memory Studies along with a number of other endeavors promising systematization and institutionalization in the vast literature on soc…
Collective Memory and Nonpublic Opinion
This article describes a little‐known moment in the history of social research, the so‐called Group Experiment (Gruppenexperiment) conducted in Germany in 1950–51 by members of the reconstituted Frankfurt school. That research, I argue, provides a missing link in the history of the ideas of deliberative democracy and public discourse, areas of political theory in which the substantive legacies of pragmatism and interactionism are particularly sig…
From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products
The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory
Jeffrey K. Olick The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory: NeoFreudian Impressions In the group too an im pression of the past is retained in unconscious memory-traces. —Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism S i n c e b e n e d i c t a n d e r s o n f i r s t p u b l i s h e d h i s l a n d m a r k Imagined Communities in 1991, scholars have alm ost ritualistically followed Anderson in quoting the nineteenth-centuiy French philoso pher Ernst Ren…
Between Chaos and Diversity
Group Experiment and Other Writings
The Security of Silence“ or „Tacit Consent“
Political science (24 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (15 works) · Collective memory (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · History (11 works)