How Nations Remember: A Narrative Approach

ISBN-13: 9780197551462 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 288 str.

James V. Wertsch

Recenzje

With citizens taking to the streets to insist that their countries confront their troubling pasts, this book could not be timelier. With his characteristic incisiveness and from a cross-disciplinary vantage point, Wertsch examines the ways different nations construct renderings of their past that often differ radically from each other and why these distinct renderings are often taken as 'truthful' and maintained with such tenacity. His adoption of a narrative approach to these issues provides insight into the underlying psychological dynamics and offers measures to mitigate the conflicts that disparate renderings of a nation's past often engender. The book is required reading for anyone interested in how memory animates and shapes national identity and actions.

O autorze

James V. Wertsch studies language, thought, and culture, with a special focus on national memory and narratives. His publications include the authored volumes Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (Harvard University Press, 1985), Voices of the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1991), Mind as Action (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge University Press, 2002), as well as edited volumes with Cambridge University Press on Vygotsky and memory studies. After finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Wertsch was a postdoctoral fellow at the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, where he studied with the neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria. Wertsch has held faculty positions at Northwestern University, the University of California, San Diego, Clark University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he has also been Vice Chancellor for International Affairs. He is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Education, and he holds honorary degrees from Linköping University and the University of Oslo. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and has served as a guest professor at the University of Oslo in Norway, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and at Fudan University in Shanghai.