Provides researchers in various disciplines with the full picture of the range of memory studies and demonstrates the critical value of having a memory culture that is an essential construct of civilization and literary and historical culture.

In Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the narrator, a Professor Aronnax, asks the enigmatic Captain Nemo if he likes the sea. And he replies: ""Yes; I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the `Living Infinite,' as one of your poets has said . . . . The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if...

Change Partners will give an educated reader a deep understanding of a particular conceptual `village' (memory, privacy, now change) -- hence the designation `intellectual ethnography.' As a book about change, this is also a book about motion, becoming, and difference, because all of these concepts circulate around the same patches of meanings. The titles of the first three chapters are self-explanatory as the three main inflections of the title: motion (mobility, mobility studies, the pleasures of walking), becoming (contingency, the clinamen, the new) and difference (dialectic and...