The lost opportunity is a familiar motif in literary & popular representations of remembering. The conventional emphasis is on the melancholic quality which casts across a subsequent life of regret ...in light of a mistakenly untaken path (this being one aspect among many in lost opportunities). There has been a critical neglect of how lost opportunities are conceived & evaluated in everyday narratives, & of how they relate to current circumstances, plans, dreams & desires. Using data gathered from in-depth interviews with women of various ages & backgrounds, this article examines the ways in which they engage with the choices they have & have not made. As a result, the commonplace mnemonic motif of lost opportunity is reconceived so as to recognize its simultaneous orientation to the past, the present & the future, implicating both memory & imagination in its enactment. Remembering lost opportunities is a key feature to a symbolic construction of self in everyday life. Adapted from the source document.
This thesis is an investigation of the relationship of women of different ages to the past from a theoretical and empirical perspective. It aims to deal with existing conceptions of time and ...temporality in late modernity in order to address the temporal relationships that human subjects are able to articulate between past and present. Women's experience forms the central focus of the study as a.response to the general neglect of women as subjects in cultural studies, and more specifically in the emerging field of memory studies. The concern with memory emerges from the identification of a contemporary temporal paradox. In everyday culture, memory and its textual forms has enjoyed a resurgence with critics hailing the emergence of a memory boom. At the same time, academic historians and cultural critics are suggesting that we have never been more divorced from our own past as we are in contemporary society. In light of this, the thesis addresses the nature and scope of everyday, remembering in two complementary ways and is structured accordingly. Firstly, in chapters one to five, these seemingly divergent trends are theoretically investigated and, in some ways at least, resolved, by assessing and reconceiving contemporary conceptualisations of memory, such as nostalgia and the separation of memory and imagination. This also involves an evaluation of the historical limitations imposed and possibilities provided by photography and phonography as ubiquitous forms of mediated representation commonly involved in mnemonic activity. Secondly, in chapters six to ten, the ways in which women remember and experience the past in their everyday lives is addressed from an empirical perspective. Depth interviews were conducted with nineteen women of different generations and ethnic backgrounds on the subject of memory and everyday encounters with the past. The analysed transcripts are used to gain insights into how women relate to the past in their everyday lives, the role that this has in constructing contemporary identities, and the minutiae of the ways in which cultural, social and personal memory intersect in the enactment of mnemonic activity in everyday life.
This thesis is an investigation of the relationship of women of different ages to the past from a theoretical and empirical perspective. It aims to deal with existing conceptions of time and ...temporality in late modernity in order to address the temporal relationships that human subjects are able to articulate between past and present. Women's experience forms the central focus of the study as a.response to the general neglect of women as subjects in cultural studies, and more specifically in the emerging field of memory studies. The concern with memory emerges from the identification of a contemporary temporal paradox. In everyday culture, memory and its textual forms has enjoyed a resurgence with critics hailing the emergence of a memory boom. At the same time, academic historians and cultural critics are suggesting that we have never been more divorced from our own past as we are in contemporary society. In light of this, the thesis addresses the nature and scope of everyday, remembering in two complementary ways and is structured accordingly. Firstly, in chapters one to five, these seemingly divergent trends are theoretically investigated and, in some ways at least, resolved, by assessing and reconceiving contemporary conceptualisations of memory, such as nostalgia and the separation of memory and imagination. This also involves an evaluation of the historical limitations imposed and possibilities provided by photography and phonography as ubiquitous forms of mediated representation commonly involved in mnemonic activity. Secondly, in chapters six to ten, the ways in which women remember and experience the past in their everyday lives is addressed from an empirical perspective. Depth interviews were conducted with nineteen women of different generations and ethnic backgrounds on the subject of memory and everyday encounters with the past. The analysed transcripts are used to gain insights into how women relate to the past in their everyday lives, the role that this has in constructing contemporary identities, and the minutiae of the ways in which cultural, social and personal memory intersect in the enactment of mnemonic activity in everyday life.
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