Forgetting Futures

Forgetting Futures reignites the debate about the crisis of memory and the search to understand the relationship between past and present, remembering and forgetting. In the book Petar Ramadanovic presents an elegant critique of the most significant concepts of memory, from Plato to Nietzsche, as he challenges the prevalent, Aristotelain understanding of memory as mere repeated presentation of the past in the present.

Ramadanovic skillfully examines the power of traumatic memory in history. Through an analysis of Cathy Caruth and a ground breaking revisionist interpretation of Toni Morrison's Beloved he shows how the memory of the Holocaust and slavery has shaped American identity. This unique study of memory places trauma, identity, and race under the intellectual microscope resulting in a book of great use for literary and cultural studies scholars, and educated readers seeking to learn more about the relationship between history and memory.

Part 1 Forgetting
Chapter 2 Forgetting:Theaetetus and Phaedrus
Chapter 3 From Time to Time: Nietzsche's Active Forgetting and Blanchot's Writing of the Diaster
Chapter 4 The Order of Memory: Versions of the Simonides Legend
Part 5 Futures
Chapter 6 When to "die in freedom" is Written in English: Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience
Chapter 7 In the Future: Reading for Trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Chapter 8 The Ghost:Beloved Again