The essential message of Annette’s Kuhn’s “Remembrance” is the importance that one single image carries, and the flashbacks we perceive just by glancing at it. Kuhn describes her family album as well as pictures of her own, like the one where she’s holding a bird, while sitting on a chair. The value that pictures carry within are beautifully described when Kuhn states “memories evoked by a photo do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in an intertext of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these cultural contexts, historical moments” (397). To the author, the image is a memory recorder, and not something that should or could be analyzed. Similarly, to the concept and the …show more content…
The Starbucks at Main Street Square was my only friend. Sometimes I’d ride the rail to Hermann Park. There’s this stone where I always found myself looking for. The stone was my comfort place, and had the perfect angle to look at people, and wonder where they come from, who they miss and what they’re sorry of. Spending my afternoons after school gazing at strangers was the only thing I could do, since my communicating skills were equaled to zero. The November’s weather was quite chilly, and I had put my cold hands in the pocket of a jacket my mother had insisted that I take. As I’m pulling out my phone to listen to Beethoven “Moonlight Sonata,” there’s this piece of “paper” that falls on the ground. The “paper” was a photograph of my mother holding the five-year-old me. Behind the paper, my mother’s handwriting said; “for when you feel lost.” Within the intervals that happen between seconds, I went back to the times where life was simple, and home was the place where my mother was. It never occurred to me that the feelings a single paper held, were the feelings you might never get from people. As I got lost on what was caught on the film, all the little memories long after I had forgotten came back. “A photograph can certainly throw you out of the scent.”
In conclusion, it is through these contradictions between history and memory that we learn not to completely rely on either form of representation, due to the vexing nature of the relationship and the deliberate selection and emphasis. It is then an understanding that through a combination of history and memory we can begin to comprehend representation. ‘The Fiftieth Gate’ demonstrates Baker’s conclusive realisation that both history and memory have reliability and usefulness. ‘Schindler’s List’ reveals how the context of a medium impacts on the selection and emphasis of details. ‘The Send-Off’ then explains how the contradiction between memory and history can show differing perspectives and motives.
Joshua Foer’s “The End of Remembering” and Kathryn Schulz’s “Evidence” are two essays that have more in common than one might think. Although on two totally different topics, they revolve around the central point of the complexities of the human mind. However, there are some key elements both writers have contemplated on in differing ways.
Memory is both a blessing and a curse; it serves as a reminder of everything, and its meaning is based upon interpretation. In Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies Dedé lives through the memory of her family and her past. She tells the stories of her and her sisters lives leading up to their deaths, and reflects upon those memories throughout her daily life. Dedé lives on for her sisters, without her sisters, but all along carrying them with her throughout her life, never moving on. Dedé lives with the shame, sadness, and regret of all that has happened to her sisters, her marriage, and her family. Dedé’s memories serve as a blessing in her eyes, but are a burden
...rm the other’s story. This does not, however, mean that they are considered equal. Memory can be seen as slightly privileged over memory. When Art learns of the destruction of his mother’s diary he responds by calling his father a “murderer”. The use of exclamatory punctuation and spiked speech bubble conveys the anger and shock over the destruction of memories. The validity of memory is also never discussed as dates given for memories are never confirmed but assumed to be true. On the other hand, history is shown as unreliable. Valdek remarks that after the end of the war he “passed once a photo place what had a camp uniform – a new and clean one – to make souvenir photos.” The actual photo is used in the book as historical documentation. This show how history can be perverted as photos are seen as objective and historical but this photograph is clearly staged.
The trip to Brooklyn didn’t turn out the way I expected this morning. I went back to Brooklyn looking for the life I had left when I went to college. My father, the Judge Albert Cohn of the New York State Supreme Court always wanted me to go away and find a life outside of Brooklyn. It meant a lot to him to have his only child to go out of Brooklyn and continue what he called his judge’s legacy. However, I always miss what I had left. Life for me has been a struggle since I became an aide for Senator Joseph McCarthy. I’m an American patriot and my job those days was to prove to the country that the State Department was full of communist infiltrators, but the Senator and I had become what the Communists and Liberals call "discredited." The Senator influence in the country’s politics had decline but my influence is still strong. I didn’t fade away as he did. I always wanted to walk the streets that I walked when I was a child one more time to reassure myself that the struggle had been worth it. I yearn when I’m alone to feel again the joy I felt when I walked by the big houses of Rugby Road on my way home after school. Walking those streets one more time, I wanted to feel Brooklyn the way it felt to me then. Like a magical kingdom. Like the Jews in the promise land after wandering in the desert for forty years. Time seems to stretch endlessly on those days; ten minutes felt more as an hour and summer felt like the whole year. Nevertheless, this time, it hadn’t worked out that way to me. The magic feeling that felt as a boy looking at those houses from the sidewalk was no longer there. It seems that my clock had stared working right again. A minute was a minute and an hour was sixty minutes as it was everywhere else. Tick, tick, tick... tick. I couldn’t stretch time again or at least not today.
When entering the room, one cannot help but feel pulled into each and every painting. The realization that the artwork hanging on the walls was created hundreds of years ago, and still exists in pristine order, to me makes these pieces of art, relics. Gazing around the still and almost silent gallery, I could not help but think that each of these paintings are windows into the past. In his essay Ways of Seeing, John Berger states that “An image became a record of how X had seen Y” (136). At the time the paintings in this gallery were painte...
In the poem, Harjo portrays the importance of recalling the past to help shape one’s identity. She uses the repetition of the word “Remember” to remind that while the past may be history, it still is a defining factor in people’s lives (l. 1). This literary technique
Sharon Olds’s poem, “I Go Back to May 1937,” is an emotional piece that takes the reader back to the early days as the speaker’s existence was first thought about. The speaker is a female who describes the scene when her parents first met; she does this to show her wrestling thoughts as she wishes she could prevent this first encounter. She speaks about this topic because of the horrendous future of regret and sorrow that her family would experience, and also to contemplate her own existence if her parents had never met in May of 1937. Olds uses forms of contrasting figurative language, an ironic plot, and a regretful tone to convey the conflict between the speaker and her parents while she fully comes to understanding of past actions, and how these serve as a way for her to release her feelings on the emotional subject.
...the point of view shifts once again. This time the speaker, now in the present, talks on a historical time scale about the events of the first two stanzas. He no longer participates, but contemplates the emotions that remembering the girl brings forth. The speaker remembers how his memory of the girl “compelled [his] imagination” (18) for “many days and many hours” (19) and wonders how things would be if they had not broken up—“How they should have been together!” (21). In this point of view, the speaker is able to reflect on his emotions about the event. Without experiencing the traumatic emotions of regret, the speaker asks, would he have had the opportunity to write about it? Only in the idealized world of his memory was the speaker able to see the art in his traumatic situation. Without that experience, he comments, “I should have lost a gesture and a pose” (22).
In Photograph, 1958 Young explores the tension between self and family through the use of a strong narrative voice and free verse poetry. With the limited usage of literary devices Young is able to write clearly, directly and with an honest conviction. This poem appears to be written as a reflection as Young depicts the photographs of her pasts with present day contemplation. The photos are stills of the emotional trauma that Young faced from her father. The tension lies in the form of escaping an abusive situation and valuing self, while dealing with the conflict of the person being her father. As Young reminisces it becomes apparent that there is more to the photographs than described.
Memory has a “saturation point” and the sympathy associated with catastrophe only lasts a finite amount of time (Hirsch 7). In relation to the mass graves used in the Holocaust, Hirsch demonstrates that the work of postmemory is “to uncover the pits again, to unearth the layers of forgetting, to go beneath the screen surfaces that disguise the crimes and try to see what these images. both expose and foreclose” (Hirsch 20). Additionally, Hirsch emphasizes the relationship between post-memory and photography. For many of those experiencing post-memory, photographs have played an essential role in their identification with trauma.
My grandmother passed away on March 15, 2012, at age 94. She was a remarkably wise and compassionate woman who brought joy to those whose lives she touched. In seeing a visible representation of my relationship with my grandmother, I am forced to confront both her life and her death simultaneously. I cannot separate my memories of her throughout my childhood with the knowledge that she has passed away. Furthermore, I can physically see her represented in this photograph just as I remember seeing her in life, but I know that this is just an image. A flat death forever preserves our embrace to the paper comprising this photograph, and this paper has lived on, having had its own life amongst my other belongings on a shelf in my room. The spectrum of the photograph powerfully emanates from the frame as both a hazy memory and an instant in time. Since I do not recognize the background of this photograph, it is possible that it was taken at our first home (which we moved from when I was three), or it is possible it was taken at my grandmother’s apartment. Regardless of the unrecognizable setting, the nature of photography demands that what was captured undoubtedly occurred at some point in time, and that this meaning extends beyond what is denotationally
Eva Hoffman’s memoir, Lost in Translation, is a timeline of events from her life in Cracow, Poland – Paradise – to her immigration to Vancouver, Canada – Exile – and into her college and literary life – The New World. Eva breaks up her journey into these three sections and gives her personal observations of her assimilation into a new world. The story is based on memory – Eva Hoffman gives us her first-hand perspective through flashbacks with introspective analysis of her life “lost in translation”. It is her memory that permeates through her writing and furthermore through her experiences. As the reader we are presented many examples of Eva’s memory as they appear through her interactions. All of these interactions evoke memory, ultimately through the quest of finding reality equal to that of her life in Poland. The comparison of Eva’s exile can never live up to her Paradise and therefore her memories of her past can never be replaced but instead only can be supplemented.
Among so many other mediums, it is of particular interest to note that the practice of photography is not simply bound to one side of the spectrum of creative expression. As much as it can be perceived as an emotional piece of art, a photo can also very well be seen as a showcase of the current social world through an objective lens. What it is that truly defines a photo as being either an artistic endeavor or a means for documentation, however, is the context in which it is meant to be viewed by a particular audience. One single picture, after all, could appear drastically different alongside an article in a newspaper than it would if it were to be framed and hung alongside other photos on a museum wall. This idea is especially prevalent in the pieces shown in the exhibition Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle, wherein several photos are both seen as a standalone piece, as well as how they appeared in magazines or journals on the Civil Rights movement. Through comparing and contrasting several sets of these pictures, each displaying two vastly different ways in which they can be observed, the importance of context in regards to photography comes into full view, giving a larger perspective on what it is that gives a specific piece a certain meaning.
It is a cool Thursday evening in Oregon. The almost freezing temperature coupled with the biting breeze sting my face, somehow heightening the anticipation of reaching the front steps of my grandparents ' house, as we are already late. The frosty blue hues of the outside sky contrast with the rich, red, brick walls and beckoning, warm yellow light shining through the windows. Still bright, though muted by curtains, the light evokes a fleeting sense of otherness. It is as if, even for a few brief moments, we are stuck in between the desire to be let in, exacerbated by our surroundings and the strange intimidation by the unknown that arises from remaining in this limbo for too long. I glance towards my mother and younger sister, holding practically