Remembering Places

Janet Donohoe is professor of philosophy at the University of West Georgia.

• Chapter One: A Phenomenology of Memory and PlaceChapter Two: From Individual to Collective MemoryChapter Three: Collective Memory, Place, and MourningChapter Four: A Hermeneutics of MonumentsChapter Five: Conclusions

Phenomenology is distinctive in that it attends not only to the everyday, ordinary, and mundane dimensions of existence, but also specifically considers such dimensions as they are experienced. Donohoe argues that the complicated relationship between memory, tradition, and place is fundamentally important to all lived experience. Place is what allows for collective memory, and such memory is what constitutes the traditions by which one finds oneself attached to specific places. Working in light of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in conversation with the phenomenological accounts of place and memory offered by Ed Casey and Gaston Bachelard, Donohoe offers a compelling account of place as a palimpsest—a form of writing that allows what has been erased to remain visible. Suggesting that memory works in the same way, Donohoe opens productive ways to think about lived experience by considering how such experience always occurs somewhere. By focusing on location and then reflecting on the meaning generated by it, Donohoe enables phenomenology to be even more careful concerning the task of philosophizing. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty.