On Nostalgia

Download or read book On Nostalgia written by David Berry and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it. From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before. "If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry's cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times." —Travis Elborough "We're so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn't a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry." —Scaachi Koul

Download or read book The Nostalgic Subject: a Genealogy of the 'Critique of Nostalgia' written by and published by Cisdig. This book was released on with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Nostalgia written by Clay Routledge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nostalgia is a topic that most lay people are familiar with, but, until recently, few social scientists understood. Once viewed as a disease, nostalgia is now considered to be an important psychological resource. It involves revisiting personally cherished memories that involve close others. When people engage in nostalgia, they experience a boost in positive psychological states such as positive mood, feelings of social connectedness, self-esteem, self-continuity, and perceptions of meaning in life. Since nostalgia promotes these positive states, when people experience negative states (such as loneliness or meaninglessness), they use nostalgia to regulate distress. This book explains in detail what nostalgia is, how views of it have changed over time, and how it has been studied by social scientists. It explores issues like how common nostalgia is and whether people differ in their tendency to be nostalgic. It looks at the triggers and inspiration for nostalgia, and the emotional states that are associated with it. Finally, the psychological, social, and behavioral effects of engaging in nostalgia are discussed. This volume provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the social scientific research into the complex and intriguing phenomenon of nostalgia. It will be of interest to a range of students and researchers in psychology and beyond, and its accessible writing style and engaging anecdotes will also be appreciated by a wider, non-academic audience.

Download or read book Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917 written by Linda Marilyn Austin and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Referred to long ago as a "disease" of Swiss soldiers and Highland regiments far from home, nostalgia became known in the 1920s as more of a fleeting rather than debilitating condition. Yet what caused this shift in our collective understanding of the term? In Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917, Linda M. Austin traces the development of nostalgia from a memory disorder in the eighteenth century to its modern formulation as a pleasant recreational distraction. Offering a paradigm for and analysis of nostalgic memory as it operates in various attempts to reenact the past, Austin explains both the early and the modern understanding of this phenomenon. Beginning with an account of nostalgia's transformation from an acute form of melancholia and homesickness into elegiac expression and idyllic representation, Austin goes on to examine an array of texts, from poetic meditations on nostalgia in the first half of the nineteenth century to the popular adult souvenirs of childhood in the second half. She shows how, in novels by Hardy; in elegies and lyrics by Arnold, Tennyson, and Emily Brontë; in illustrations by Kate Greenaway and Helen Allingham; and in late Victorian cultural histories of the cottage, nostalgia acts as a collective, rather than an individual reenactment of an invented, rather than a remembered, past or place. For students and scholars interested in the Victorian era, as well as in Romanticism and modernism, Nostalgia in Transition provides a well-rounded perspective on how and why our understanding of nostalgia has changed over time.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia written by Tobias Becker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-21 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly. Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements, and gaps in existing literature. Comprising 45 chapters, the volume covers the following topics: Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology. Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory. Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia. Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects. Media-related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels. Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history, and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum, and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present.

Download or read book Nostalgia written by Agnes Arnold-Forster and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2024-04-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Absorbing' - Guardian 'Arnold-Forster is a shrewd critic and delightful guide . . . She carries weighty learning lightly – embracing everything relevant, from dubious neuroscience to cod sociology.' - The Telegraph In Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Agnes Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from its first identification in seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it is co-opted by advertising agencies and politicians alike to sell us goods and policies). Nostalgia is a social and political emotion, vulnerable to misuse, and one that reflects the anxieties of the age. It is one of the many ways we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction with the present and our visions for the future. Arnold-Forster’s fascinating history of this complex, slippery emotion is a lens through which to consider the changing pace of society, our collective feelings of regret, dislocation and belonging, the conditions of modern and contemporary work, and the politics of fear and anxiety. It is also a clear-eyed analysis of what we are doing now, how we feel about it and what we might want to change about the world we live in. ‘Arnold-Forster belongs to that valuable non-jargon-spouting breed of academic who is capable of explaining complex ideas in simple language.’ - The Times

Download or read book Watching Nostalgia written by Stefanie Armbruster and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is nostalgia in television? How far does a nostalgic text trigger nostalgic emotions? And how are nostalgic series received by different audience groups? Stefanie Armbruster uses an interdisciplinary approach as analytical and theoretical basis. Her detailed analyses identify nostalgia in reruns, remakes and period dramas such as "Knight Rider" or "Mad Men". Focus group discussions with German and Spanish viewers give new insights into its reception. The in-depth study helps to understand the interrelation of nostalgic texts and nostalgic reception better and explores a decisive part of a phenomenon that is omnipresent in our current TV landscape.