The Theoretical Foundations of Hungarian ‘lieux de mémoire’ Studies

Leírás

French historian Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire has become an internationally accepted scholarly term today used to grasp how communities seek to avoid the forgetting caused by the fast pace of change. The means employed are most often symbolic objects that carry the memories of the community’s own past—a specific feature of collective memory in the modern age. Besides the research on sites of memory developed in Europe within national frameworks, other new perspectives have emerged. At the University of Debrecen the systematic study of Hungarian lieux de mémoire began in 2011 taking advantage of the considerable previous research and theoretical discussions. The aim of the present series is to add to the international discussion of lieux de mémoire by providing a comprehensive view of Hungarian sites of memory.
This first volume features a variety of papers from the Loci Memoriae Hungaricae—The Theoretical Foundations of Hungarian ’lieux de mémoire’ Studies conference including some of the most recent results of research upon memory sites along with the lectures of invited authorites, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann and Pim den Boer. The essays in the second Hungarian volume (Loci Memoriae Hungaricae II— A magyar emlékezethelyek kutatásának elméleti és módszertani alapjai) are not only from the Loci Memoriae Hungaricae conference but also from another interdisciplinary conference on Mohács as a representative site of Hungarian memory.