Author Archive for: ‘Robert Burgoyne’
The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World
Among the deepest and most indelible fictions of American national origin is the notion of the “new world” encountered by the earliest English colonists, a world typically characterized as a dense wilderness populated by “children of the forest,” a land untouched by the hand of any culture. Forming the backdrop of almost all subsequent narratives of nation, this idealized image …
Read MoreProsthetic memory/ traumatic memory: Forrest Gump (1994)
Uploaded 16 April 1999 In this essay I would like to consider some of the ramifications of a widely accepted yet undertheorized idea: that the preeminence of the moving image in contemporary culture has reshaped our collective imaginary relation to history. This widely circulated observation has been the subject of much anguished commentary from the widest possible range of critics. …
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