[PDF] HISTORY, MEMORY, AND NOSTALGIA:

What is the difference between nostalgia and sentimentality?

Nostalgia is the cultivation of memory as the object of sorrow. It occurs when the past, however vivid, is recognized as past, and so nostalgia can be an expansion of the obsession of sentimentality, a necropolis of time, since the past is loved because it is past. But nostalgia is double edged.

Is nostalgia a form of subaltern memory?

Students of memory have often been inclined to look sympathetically upon informal, communal projects of remembrance, particularly among subordinate or marginal groups and in cases where that group memory has not readily been legitimated by more rigid kinds of historiographic understanding. Nostalgia can be a potent form of such subaltern memory.

Is nostalgia a psychiatric disease?

Progressively embedded in psychophysiology, in the 19th century the disease came to be regarded as a form of corporeal and instinctual memory (Austin, 2007), before its eventual disappearance as a diagnostic category within the emergent science of psychiatry. By then, nostalgia had begun a new life as a cultural, and especially a literary, mode.

What is nostalgia and why is it important?

Whatever its object, nostalgia serves as a negotiation between continuity and discontinuity: it insists on the bond between our present selves and a certain fragment of the past, but also on the force of our separation from what we have lost.