Memory: Ars Memoriae, Collective Memory, and the Fortunes of Rhetoric

Abstract

This essay delineates essential features of memory as a salient topos of rhetorical literature, both classical and modern. This essay also considers how both the arts of rhetoric and memory alike underwent cultural devaluation in Western modernity only to reappear in altered forms as compelling objects of analysis. In doing so, the essay contends that current enthusiasms for the study of collective memory in communication and composition studies alike signify forms of simultaneous connection and disconnection with the historical role of rhetoric in the classical art of memory.

Keywords:

• ars memoriae
• collective memory
• memorization
• metaphysics
• social frameworks

Notes

¹ See Carruthers, Craft of Thought and Book of Memory; Yates.

² Bergson’s Matter and Memory requires acknowledgment as well.

³ Key sources include Bodnar; Gillis; Hobsbawm and Ranger; Hyussen; Kammen; Nora, “Between” and Realms.