This book is about memory—about how the past persists into the present, and about how this persistence has been understood over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, memory has been the source of an intense disquiet. Fundamental cultural theories have sought to understand it, and have striven to represent its stresses.
Richard Terdiman is Professor of Literature and the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This breathtaking explication of the importance of memory in modernity sets the stage for brilliant readings that analyze a series of canonical works as symptoms of and reflections on the memory crisis.... Present Past is most importantly a contribution to our historical understanding of modernism and modernity.- Eugene W. Holland (Nineteenth-Century French Studies)
