Description
Reading films, television dramas, reality shows, and virtual exhibits, among other popular texts, Engaging the Past examines the making and meaning of history for everyday viewers. Alison Landsberg considers the films Hotel Rwanda (2004), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), and Milk (2008); the television dramas Deadwood, Mad Men, and Rome; the reality shows Colonial House, Frontier House, and Texas Ranch House; and The Secret Annex Online, accessed through the website for the Anne Frank House, and the Kristallnacht exhibit, featured on the Unites States Holocaust Museum website. These mass-cultural texts cultivate what Landsberg calls an "affective engagement" with the past, tying the viewer to an event or person and fostering a sense of intimacy that does more than simply transport the viewer back in time. Affect, she suggests, can also work to disorient viewers, forcibly pushing them out of the narrative and back into their own bodies. By analyzing these specific popular history formats, Landsberg shows how they provoke historical thinking and produce historical knowledge, prompting a reconsideration of what constitutes history and an understanding of how it works in the contemporary mediated public sphere.
About the Author
Alison Landsberg is an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History and the Department of Cultural Studies at George Mason University. She is the author of Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture.
Reviews
Alison Landsberg skillfully penetrates one of the most interesting yet elusive questions about popular representations of the past. What kinds of knowledge of the past do they offer? In elegant and precise analyses of selected texts, she demonstrates how they engage affect and emotion through experiential modes of communication. Contrary to many assumptions about such forms, Landsberg brilliantly argues that these reenactments have the potential to provoke self-conscious historical thinking much sought after by more conventional historical modes of communication. -- Ann Gray, emerita professor of cultural studies, University of Lincoln The book is carefully structured, sensitively expressed, and the analysis of thevarious media a contribution to thinking differently about cinematic uses ofpast. Critical Inquiry
Book Information
ISBN 9780231165754
Author Alison Landsberg
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press