Moving Back in Memory Studies

First published in German in 1992 (by Beck in Munich), Jan Assmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen has now been translated into English from a 2007 German revision of the original edition. The jacket blurbs hail it as ‘an absolute classic’, ‘a genuine tour-de-force’ that ‘will surely transform discourse in Anglophone scholarship’. There is no doubting the first two judgements, but the last is unlikely to happen because the comparative, phenomenological and structuralist analysis that Assmann employed in this early study of cultural memory has already occupied Anglophone scholarship in comparative religion and anthropological histories for more than three decades. If there were an English series of ‘Classic Studies in the Social Sciences’, Assmann’s book would surely have an honoured place. Reading it now, I have a strong sensation of moving backwards in time, a reaction reinforced by the failure to update the bibliography to any significant degree since the 1992 German edition, except for additional works by Jan Assmann and/or his wife and co-author, Aleida.

Art · German · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Reading (process) · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Wife · Classics · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy

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