Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T19:10:44.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Of Storytellers and Master Narratives: Modernity, Memory, and History in Fascist Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Simonetta Falasca Zamponi
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his 1936 essay on Nikolai Leskov—”The Storyteller”—Walter Benjamin (1969) lamented the destruction of collective memory that was taking place with the passage from community to society. In the transformed structure of modern life, claimed Benjamin, our ability to exchange experiences has diminished, and along with it, a collective sense of meaning. While tradition collapses under the irresistible force of the development of economic production, human perception also appears to be affected and penetrated by a logic of rationalization. This logic tends to annul more than past traditions and their meaning as vehicles for communal understanding; it also undermines the capacity for experience in general. In the modern world of machines and automatons, Benjamin feared, tradition was irreparably lost. With it there also vanished the remnants of collective dreams and aspirations that in the past had formed the humus of people’s redemptive path toward a meaningful and fulfilled life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 4: Memory and the nation , Winter 1998 , pp. 415 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alfieri, D., and Freddi, L. (1933) Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista. Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche.Google Scholar
Aquarone, A. (1965) L’organizzazione dello stato totalitario. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies. New York: Paladin.Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. (1969) Illuminations. New York: Schocken.Google Scholar
Bolzoni, L. (1995) La stanza della memoria. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Brandt, S. (1994) “The memory makers: Museums and exhibitions of the First World War.” History and Memory 6: 95–122.Google Scholar
Brooks, P. (1987) “The storyteller.” Yale Journal of Criticism 1: 21–38.Google Scholar
Chabod, F. (1961) Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896. Bari: Laterza.Google Scholar
Croce, B. (1966 [1928]) Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915. Bari: Laterza.Google Scholar
Durkheim, E. (1915) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Falasca Zamponi, S. (1997) Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Findlen, P. (1994) Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Findlen, P. (1998) “Possessing the past: The material world of the Italian Renaissance.” American Historical Review 1: 83–114.Google Scholar
Galli, G. (1982) “Il fascismo e la violenza come strumento di azione politica,” in Casuçci, C. (ed.) Il fascismo: Antologia di scritti critici. Bologna: Il Mulino: 591–98.Google Scholar
Gentile, E. (1993) Il culto del littorio: La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista. Bari: Laterza.Google Scholar
Goody, J. (1991) “The time of telling and the telling of time in written and oral cultures,” in Bender, J. and Wellbergy, D. (eds.) Chronotypes: The Construction of Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 77–96.Google Scholar
Gramsci, A. (1985) Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. Forgacs, D. and Smith, G. Nowell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, J. (1979) “Consciousness-raising and redemptive criticism: The contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin.” New German Critique 17: 30–59.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, M. (1980 [1925]) The Collective Memory, ed. Douglas, M.. New York: Harper-Colophon Books.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, M. (1992 [1925]) On Collective Memory, ed. Coser, L.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Herf, J. (1984) Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Honneth, A. (1993) “A communicative disclosure of the past: On the relation between anthropology and philosophy of history in Walter Benjamin.” New Formations 20: 81–92.Google Scholar
Hutton, P. (1993) History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Le Goff, J. (1992) History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Ludwig, E. (1932) Colloqui con Mussolini. Milan: Mondadori.Google Scholar
Mussolini, B. (1934–39) Scritti e discorsi. 12 vols. Milan: Hoepli.Google Scholar
Mussolini, B. (1951–63) Opera Omnia. 36 vols. Florence: La Fenice.Google Scholar
Nairn, T. (1991) The Break-up of Britain. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Nora, P. (1989) “Between memory and history.” Representations 26: 7–25.Google Scholar
Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Paetzoldt, H. (1977) “Walter Benjamin’s theory of the end of art.” International Journal of Sociology 7: 25–75.Google Scholar
Repaci, A. (1972) La Marcia su Roma. Milan: Rizzoli.Google Scholar
Roth, M. (1989) “Remembering forgetting: Maladies de la mémoire in nineteenth-century France.” Representations 26: 49–68.Google Scholar
Roth, M. (1991) “Dying of the past: Medical studies of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France.” History and Memory 3: 7–29.Google Scholar
Sarfatti, M. (1990) “Architettura, arte e simbolo alla Mostra del Fascismo,” in Barocchi, P. (ed.) Storia Moderna dell’Arte in Italia, vol. 3. Turin: Einaudi: 220–27.Google Scholar
Schnapp, J. (1992) “Epic demonstrations: Fascist modernity and the 1932 exhibition of the fascist revolution,” in Golsan, J. (ed.) Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England: 1–37.Google Scholar
Schwartz, B. (1982) “The social context of commemoration: A study in collective memory.” Social Forces 61: 374–97.Google Scholar
Stone, M. (1993) “Staging fascism: The exhibition of the fascist revolution.” Journal of Contemporary History 28: 225–43.Google Scholar
Terdiman, R. (1993) Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
White, H. (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wohlfarth, I. (1978) “On the messianic structure of Walter Benjamin’s last reflections.” Glyph 3: 148–212.Google Scholar
Yates, F. (1966) The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Zerubavel, Y. (1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar