A Study On The Collective Memory In Historical Changes

Collective memory is a process and result of social construction. Lei Feng is one of the most successful model, set by Chinese Communist Party and Chinese government. Being a kind of collective memory, the image of Lei Feng has changed a lot since 1960s, which made by construction of news media, and witnessed the historical changes of China society.The thesis is done by the reports of Lei Feng from People’s Daily between the year of 1961 to 2014, which is divided into three phases according to the differences of the construction, and apply archetype deposition theory to analyze the process of the image’s construction. The analysis frame of this thesis is based on process of archetype deposition, which include archetype arousal, archetype displacement and archetype deposition. By measurement and analyze of reports, I wanted to show up the changes of Lei Feng image’s construction for exhibition the changes of collective memory in the history.In the first chapter, I combed the core concepts and explained the three process of archetype deposition. In the second chapter, I made some graphs to exhibit the quantitative statistics of the reports for showing the changes clearly. The third chapter to the fifth chapter are the main parts of the thesis. These three chapters expound the archetype arousal, archetype displacement and archetype deposition separately, in order to exhibit how the three processes be realized.The three phases of Lei Feng image’s construction from People’s Daily process, exhibited the construction’s changes of history. And the reason of the changes is not only because of the changes of social reality, but also of the changes of political and society demands. On the basis of the above analysis, this thesis draws a conclusion:the process of Lei Feng image’s construction from People’s Daily shows the changes of political and society demands, and the collective memory could be changed by reports and witness the historical changes.