In this remarkable book, Vera Schwarcz explores the meanings of cultural memory within the two longest surviving civilizations on earth. The author of previous books that the __New York Times Book Review__ called "moving" and Jonathan Spence termed "subtle, elegiac, and elegant," Schwarcz finds a bridge between the vastly different Chinese and Jewish traditions in the fierce commitment to historical memory they share. For both, a chain of remembrance has allowed tradition to endure uninterrupted from ancient times to the present; for both, the transmission of remembrance and the bearing of active witness to the significance of the past are high moral values. From her unique standpoint as China scholar and daughter of survivors of the Holocaust, Schwarcz uncovers resonances between the narratives of Chinese intellectuals recovering from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the halting tales of her own parents.
Focusing on the transmission of cultural memory in these two cultures, the author examines how metaphor becomes an aid to memory, the role of personal remembrance in public commemorations, and the process of healing historical wounds. Combining poetry and historiography, oral interviews and archival documents, this book brings to life the struggles of Chinese and Jewish survivors who managed to cultivate memory through inimical times and preserve the continuity of their long traditions.

lgrsnf/10.12987_9780300144055.pdf

lgli/10.12987_9780300144055.pdf

nexusstc/Bridge Across Broken Time/30f8f342df32058f4ae25026328aae48.pdf

Vera Schwarcz

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Brandywine River Museum

Mariners' Museum, The

United States, United States of America

New Haven, CT, 1998

1, 1998-06-16

2017

producers:
iTextSharp 5.0.6 (c) 1T3XT BVBA

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<p>The rise of atheism in the modern world is a religious phenomenon unprecedented in history, both in the number of its adherents and in the security of its cultural establishment. <em>How did so revolutionary a conviction as this arise? What can theological reflection learn from this massive shift in religious consciousness?</em></p>
<p>In this book, Michael J. Buckley investigates the origins and development of modern atheism and argues convincingly that its impetus lies paradoxically in the very attempts to counter it. Although modern atheism finds its initial exponents in Denis Diderot and Paul d&rsquo;Holbach in the eighteenth century, their works bring to completion a dialectical process that reaches back to the theologians and philosophers of an earlier period.&nbsp; During the seventeenth century, theologians such as Leonard Lessius and Marin Mersenne determined that in order to defend the existence of god, religious apologetics must become philosophy, surrendering as its primary warrant any intrinsically religious experience or evidence. The most influential philosophers of the period, Ren&eacute; Descartes and Isaac Newton, and the theologians who followed them accepted this settlement, and the new sciences were enlisted to provide the foundation for religion.</p>
<p>Almost no one suspected the profound contradictions that this process entailed and that would eventually resolve themselves through the negation of god.&nbsp; In transferring to other areas of human experience and inquiry its fundamental responsibility to deal with the existence of god, religion dialectically generated its own denial.&nbsp; The origins and extraordinary power of modern atheism lie with this progressive self-alienation of religion itself.</p>

Contents 5
Preface 7
Introduction: Because of Memory, Because of Hope, Because of Distress 15
One. How to Moke Time Real: From Intellectual History to Embodied Memory 33
Two. The Bridge of Words: Memory and Metaphor in Chinese and Jewish Tradition 61
Three. Burning Snow: Naming the Broken Fragments of Time 83
Four. Notes in the Wall: Personal Memory in the Crevices of Public Commemoration 103
Five. Light Possersby: Jewish Recollections of Shanghai... and Cluj 139
Six. The Master’s Tears: Memory and the Healing of Historical Wounds 167
Conclusion: And If There Was No Bridge? 193
Notes 209
Bibliography 227
Index 239

2023-05-29