Prosthetic memory: The logics and politics of memory in modern American culture

In response to the impending threat posed by the new technologies of reproduction, modern theorists of memory, such as Proust, Bergson, Halbwachs, Benjamin and Freud, defined a traditional, organic and community-based, "authentic" form of memory. My project, instead, foregrounds how the very distinction between authentic and inauthentic, organic and inorganic, natural and artificial, dissolves with the emergence of new modes of experience, sensation and history enabled by American mass culture. Moreover, my dissertation explores the mass cultural technologies of memory that enable individuals to experience memories of traumatic events through which they themselves did not live--memories I am calling "prosthetic memories." Prosthetic memories circulate publicly, but are nevertheless experienced with one's own body--by means of various cultural technologies--and as such, become part of one's personal archive of experience, informing not only one's subjectivity, but one's relationship to the present and future tenses.;The first chapter uses Blade Runner and Total Recall to theorize implanted memory; the chapter recognizes the danger of modern mass mediated forms of memory--their susceptibility to historical revisionism--but also the potential of such memories to be transformative, opening up possibilities for collective horizons of experience. The subsequent chapters are organized around crisis moments in the American past: immigration in the 1920s, slavery, and the Holocaust. In each of these cases the "normal" generational links between parents and children have been severed, rendering impossible generational transmission of memory. These events appear not as histories, but as instances of collective remembering, bringing into dramatic relief confrontations between individuals and mass cultural technologies of memory. Reading texts as various as DeMille's film Road to Yesterday, Roth's Call It Sleep, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Haley's miniseries Roots, Morrison's Song of Solomon, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Spiegelman's Maus, I explore the interface between private and public memory, describing how the body redraws its boundaries as a result of such encounters. By considering the ways different media manage crisis moments in American national memory, my dissertation investigates how national publics are formed over incitements to remember, forget, contain and disseminate cultural memory across generations.