This article argues that today’s search for identity, in the context of the rise of a new spirituality and the decline of authoritative memories, facilitates the forging of a new connection between soul and memory and enhances the importance of traumatic memories. Consequently, we witness the sacralization of memory which in unsettled times, when memories tend to become fixed and frozen, can undermine intergroup cooperation. The article asserts that an ethical burden, prompted by viewing memory as the surrogate of the (...) soul and the overrating of the importance of the politics of identity, can result in the displacement of public concerns with private ones. It stresses a need to rethink what kind of memory is compatible with a just, pluralist and cohesive democratic system. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to show that Koselleck’s thesis on the dissolution of the topos historia magistra vitae in modernity is open to certain objections, to the extent that one finds in modernity a number of practical conceptions of history which are “useful for life”. My own thesis is that the topos of history as the “Guide to Life” is not so much dissolved as rather transformed with modernity, and in a sense which has to be specified. This (...) point of view will be defended with reference to European authors of the nineteenth century, though I will add some observations on the twentieth century in the last part of the paper. (shrink)

El artículo se propone mostrar el potencial innovador del concepto de “creatividad” en la filología. Los autores-testigos, Mauricio Rosencof y Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro –ambos víctimas de la dictadura militar uruguaya–, se alejan de las estrategias narrativas tradicionales en Memorias del calabozo y se sirven de la creatividad para crear una nueva poética del terror. La estrategia narrativa principal, el leitmotiv, es la creatividad. Tanto a nivel de la producción literaria como a nivel del contenido, la creatividad es omnipresente. La creatividad (...) cumple así una función doble: primero, recurrir a formas narrativas creativas ayuda a los autores a transmitir tanto experiencias individuales como colectivas; segundo, la creatividad se revela como única estrategia de supervivencia. (shrink)