Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future. Francis OGorman shows how forgetting has been embraced as a requirement for modern existence and how our education, as well as life with fast-moving technology, further disconnects us from our pasts. But he also examines the cultural narratives that urge us to resist our collective amnesia. OGorman argues that such narratives, in rich but oblique ways, indicate our guilt about modernity's great unmooring from history. Forgetfulness asks what the absence of history does to our sense of purpose, as well as what belonging both to time and place might mean in cultures without a memory. It is written in praise of the best achievement and deeds of the past, but is also an expression of profound anxiety about what forgetting them is doing to us.
See more
Current price
€23.85
Original price
€26.50
Save 10%
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days
Product Details
Weight: 393g
Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
Publication Date: 05 Oct 2017
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Publication City/Country: United States
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781501324697
About Francis O'GormanProfessor Francis O'Gorman
Francis OGorman from English Irish and Hungarian families was born in 1967 and educated as C.S. Deneke Organ Scholar of Lady Margaret Hall Oxford where he took a double first and a doctorate in English literature. He is the author or editor of 23 books mostly on English literature and of essays on literature music and the condition of the modern English university. His Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (Bloomsbury 2015) described by John Carey as subtle exploratory completely original was a Guardian Book of the Week a Sunday Times Must Read and one of Bookbags History Books of the Year 2015. For a decade Francis OGorman held a chair in the School of English at the University of Leeds; he is now Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. When not working he likes playing the organ walking Arthurs Seat or sitting in a bar.