Disputed Memory by Tea Sindbæk Andersen Barbara Törnquist-Plewa

Author:Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa [Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Eastern Europe, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Political Science
ISBN: 9781785331237
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2016-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Reception of Monuments

The study of the reception of monuments is grounded in the reception theory that originated in the literary studies of Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 1960s.569 The present work strives to engage in the dialogue about the critique that studies on memory do not adequately reflect the role of audiences. As the student of memory Kansteiner contended: “Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question.”570 Likewise, James Young proposed that the study of memory as represented in public monuments should focus on “the constant give and take between memorials and viewers, and finally the responses of viewers to their own world in light of a memorialized past – the consequences of memory.”571

Studies of reception stress that meaning is produced both by the speaker and the reader (listener, viewer, visitor, etc). Hence, meaning arises only through the interaction between these two poles. In his theory of encoding and decoding Stuart Hall drew our attention to the fact that there is a discrepancy between a message encoded and a message decoded.572 The size of the discrepancy depends on the shared codes, previous knowledge and the values of the encoders and decoders. The reception of monuments includes reception both of the materiality of the monument located in the landscape and of the history which this monument represents. The latter is the main concern of the present paper.

This chapter presents the results of participant observation and interviews conducted near the monument to Klym Savur. A monument may remain unnoticed for many, but when people are asked to reflect on its meaning they start making sense not only of the monument but also of the history embodied in that monument.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.