Baker Academic

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Embedded Experience and Disciplinary Power - Le Donne

In reading a wonderful essay by our own Prof. Chris Keith today, I landed upon this quotation by Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins:
“If ‘experience’ . . . is always embedded in and occurs through narrative frames, then there is no primal, unmediated experience that can be recovered.  The distinction between history and memory in such accounts is a matter of disciplinary power rather than of epistemological privilege.” (“Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” ARS 24 (1998): 105–40, here 110.)
For more along these lines, see my most recent thoughts here.

-anthony



2 comments:

  1. By "experience", do you mean the external thing experienced, or the internal quality of experiencing something?

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  2. Good question, I would have to revisit the context of the quotation to answer that question. If Chris wasn't toting luggage at the moment, we could ask him.

    -anthony

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