Introduction: Memory in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This book maps, contextualises and analyses the changing state of cognition, and, more specifically, memory, at the start of the twenty-first century. Our contemporary period is characterised by a multiplicity of revolutions that together are radically reshaping the context of our thinking about what it means to be a human being. Globalisation, overpopulation, climate change, geopolitical shifts and ruptures after 9/11, an ageing population, ongoing scientific breakthroughs, AI and human enhancement, and the dominance of the internet, and the presence of new technologies and social media in our lives are just a few examples of developments that are having a major impact upon the understanding of ourselves and the world. Climate change poses urgent questions about the weight of mankind’s collective carbon footprint on the earth, but also puts forward new temporal complexities and paradoxes. Apocalyptic fictions such as Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004) and The Age of Stupid (Dir. Fanny Armstrong 2009) ask us to imagine ourselves from an imagined point in the future: the present becomes a future memory. Diseases of the ageing brain, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s, prompt painful question about identity and selfhood, and challenge our relationships with loved ones, as J. Bernlef’s novel Out of Mind (1984; 1989) and Michael Haneke’s film Amour (2012) explore. Amnesia continues to be mined by novelists and filmmakers, from Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2000), to, more recently, Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2014), Peter Carey’s Amnesia (2014) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015).