Very interesting topic. On the image of the lenses of nostalgia and trauma is that analogy consistent with your previous framing? Nostalgia as you present it (I think rightly) with the idea of smoothing over past memories and filling in gaps to match present understanding of the events or times to which they relate is a subconscious process which occurs before recollection and is weakened by examination. In this way it is similar to the idea of receiving a changed image through bifocals. Trauma, as you say, is born out of “examination” and so is more akin to shining something through a prism and is an active and conscious process. Moreover nostalgia is shaped by many factors, perhaps most prominently the way in which we understood whatever is the object of the nostalgic feeling at the time and now, and how we now understand who were were when we first understood it. These considerations, especially the last are particularly eisegetic and therefore the one experiencing the nostalgia is more agent in its form even if the process is subconscious. Considerations of causes for trauma are often rooted in historical or contemporary events and as such are more exegetic, even if the process of their discovery is more active. As such it is hard to see as equals, or at least without more justification? Very sorry if I’ve misunderstood your point and have as a result misrepresented your argument here.
I don't know if you're contradicting my argument as much as adding another dimension to it, because I don't think it depends on whether trauma and nostalgia operate on precisely inversed analytical frameworks. Rather, it's their political functions that are counterposed with each other. Your comparison of exegesis vs eisegesis could add value in a more in-depth exploration of the relationship (or, I suppose, lack thereof) of traumatic and nostalgic interpretation from a quasi-literary perspective, though there are plenty of other analytical lenses that I passed over because of the limitations of space and time. This is a very rich domain of analysis and there's much more yet to be said!
I totally sympathise with your point about constraints of space and time in this article, and imagine there is a huge temptation to slightly neatly square things away when at the end of one’s budget. I can’t imagine trying to write about such a broad topic under a word count, (as you have probably discerned from these comments) I am not a concise writer myself. I see what you mean about opposite political function, but I’m not sure that contention can be extended into your final conclusion. That they are contrary does not necessitate or really begin to justify their being equal or symmetrical.
Re the lenses the image doesn’t account for the different direction of interpretive bias in the two processes. Perhaps it depends on your object oriented ontology. Even then it surely wouldn’t correspond wholly in one of the two instances. I think sight is commonly understood to be a process of reception so seemingly more in line with the latter.
Re the point about exegesis and eisegesis, I do not mean it so much in the literary sense as in what I (perhaps falsely) understand to be its social root. Hermeneutics, which I would associate with exegesis in this framework, only begins time be challenged by deconstructionist ideas and other postmodern theories of interpretation in academic settings after the Second World War. It has always seemed to me that these methods that arose were in many ways a response to seeing the turmoil of the first half of the 20th century, especially the 30s and 40s and the dangerous political thinking that birthed them most prominently in the Axes powers but more broadly globally as being the terminus of this singularising way of thinking. Of course there are writers exploring this before the twentieth century but this method of understanding the world and the literature that results from it. Perhaps the most notable — Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner — follow the First World War but are underpinned by the same cause. I think this lines up with your analysis of the 50s and explains why it is a time charged with quite so much symbolic value as it is the watershed of the moment this transition is made mainstream and the forming of individual centred ideology. In this (I think it is fair to say?) postmodern process of searching for trauma in one’s life one seeks to expand oneself as is in line with this way of thinking and so must draw from the world inwards (and in so doing ironically narrows oneself around established wounds?). Nostalgia, which is a process of reforming the past world to match oneself is an eisegetic process outwards and in so doing is boundless and shapeless?
I am aware that this is a long drawn out comment and so apologise and understand totally if you don’t want to engage with this any further. I hope that it is a least some compliment to know that it is the result of your own writing being interesting.
This rocks
The rocks are made of coccoliths
Very interesting topic. On the image of the lenses of nostalgia and trauma is that analogy consistent with your previous framing? Nostalgia as you present it (I think rightly) with the idea of smoothing over past memories and filling in gaps to match present understanding of the events or times to which they relate is a subconscious process which occurs before recollection and is weakened by examination. In this way it is similar to the idea of receiving a changed image through bifocals. Trauma, as you say, is born out of “examination” and so is more akin to shining something through a prism and is an active and conscious process. Moreover nostalgia is shaped by many factors, perhaps most prominently the way in which we understood whatever is the object of the nostalgic feeling at the time and now, and how we now understand who were were when we first understood it. These considerations, especially the last are particularly eisegetic and therefore the one experiencing the nostalgia is more agent in its form even if the process is subconscious. Considerations of causes for trauma are often rooted in historical or contemporary events and as such are more exegetic, even if the process of their discovery is more active. As such it is hard to see as equals, or at least without more justification? Very sorry if I’ve misunderstood your point and have as a result misrepresented your argument here.
I don't know if you're contradicting my argument as much as adding another dimension to it, because I don't think it depends on whether trauma and nostalgia operate on precisely inversed analytical frameworks. Rather, it's their political functions that are counterposed with each other. Your comparison of exegesis vs eisegesis could add value in a more in-depth exploration of the relationship (or, I suppose, lack thereof) of traumatic and nostalgic interpretation from a quasi-literary perspective, though there are plenty of other analytical lenses that I passed over because of the limitations of space and time. This is a very rich domain of analysis and there's much more yet to be said!
I totally sympathise with your point about constraints of space and time in this article, and imagine there is a huge temptation to slightly neatly square things away when at the end of one’s budget. I can’t imagine trying to write about such a broad topic under a word count, (as you have probably discerned from these comments) I am not a concise writer myself. I see what you mean about opposite political function, but I’m not sure that contention can be extended into your final conclusion. That they are contrary does not necessitate or really begin to justify their being equal or symmetrical.
Re the lenses the image doesn’t account for the different direction of interpretive bias in the two processes. Perhaps it depends on your object oriented ontology. Even then it surely wouldn’t correspond wholly in one of the two instances. I think sight is commonly understood to be a process of reception so seemingly more in line with the latter.
Re the point about exegesis and eisegesis, I do not mean it so much in the literary sense as in what I (perhaps falsely) understand to be its social root. Hermeneutics, which I would associate with exegesis in this framework, only begins time be challenged by deconstructionist ideas and other postmodern theories of interpretation in academic settings after the Second World War. It has always seemed to me that these methods that arose were in many ways a response to seeing the turmoil of the first half of the 20th century, especially the 30s and 40s and the dangerous political thinking that birthed them most prominently in the Axes powers but more broadly globally as being the terminus of this singularising way of thinking. Of course there are writers exploring this before the twentieth century but this method of understanding the world and the literature that results from it. Perhaps the most notable — Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner — follow the First World War but are underpinned by the same cause. I think this lines up with your analysis of the 50s and explains why it is a time charged with quite so much symbolic value as it is the watershed of the moment this transition is made mainstream and the forming of individual centred ideology. In this (I think it is fair to say?) postmodern process of searching for trauma in one’s life one seeks to expand oneself as is in line with this way of thinking and so must draw from the world inwards (and in so doing ironically narrows oneself around established wounds?). Nostalgia, which is a process of reforming the past world to match oneself is an eisegetic process outwards and in so doing is boundless and shapeless?
I am aware that this is a long drawn out comment and so apologise and understand totally if you don’t want to engage with this any further. I hope that it is a least some compliment to know that it is the result of your own writing being interesting.
So wonderful, thank you for this
Hello Dylan. I enjoyed your very insightful essay. Much for me to think about. But someone who was ten in 1955 turns 70 this year, not eighty...