The Idea of Nostalgia

Abstract

In tracing the history of emotions and of mentalities, one is immediately confronted with a question of method resulting from the interplay of emotions and language.The emotions whose history we wish to retrace are accessible to us only from the time when they find expression, verbally or by other means. For the critic, for the historian, an emotion exists only beyond the point at which it attains a linguistic status. No facet of an emotion can be traced before it is named, before it is designated and expressed. It is not, then, the emotion itself which comes before us; only that part which has passed into a given form of expression can be of interest to the historian.

Mobile Meat Puppetry? Ruined Infrastructures, Embodiment and Agency in Driving

“…However, she notes that the ruins of other social and political formations, such as Modernity (Ramet, 1996). In Serbo-Croat the term holds all of the pathological connotations implicit in the original meaning of nostalgia-a malady borne of the experience of rupture (Starobinski, 1966). They are, in a sense rendered, like João Biehl's informants in Brazil's zones of abandonment, human ruins of a defunct social and political formation (Biehl, 2005).…”

Mining the Box: Adaptation, Nostalgia and Generation X

“…Having evolved from a medical to an emotional and aesthetic concept (Grainge, 2000;Starobinski, 1966;Turner, 1987), the contemporary use of nostalgia incorporates a further shift from essentially longing to return to a place to longing to return to a time. As one can never actually return to a time already passed, nostalgia takes on a fundamentally contradictory quality.…”

Negotiating meaning in the consumption of the past

“…Nostalgia has been defined many times (by, e.g., Starobinski 1966;Davis 1979;Grainge 2002;Lowenthal 1985;Pickering and Keightley 2006) and was commonly considered as a longing (originally a home-sickness). It is still presented by some of these authors as a longing for something that is absent -real or imagined -a set of values or a different aesthetic style.…”