The Future of Nostalgia

What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Svetlana Boym opens up a new a venue of inquiry: the study of nostalgia. Combining personal memoir, phi... » 

What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Svetlana Boym opens up a new a venue of inquiry: the study of nostalgia. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Svetlana Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities-St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes. «