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Nostalgia 1

This document discusses different types and understandings of nostalgia. It begins by defining nostalgia as a "longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed" involving feelings of loss and displacement as well as fantasy. It then distinguishes between reflective nostalgia, which delays return home and calls the past into doubt, and restorative nostalgia, which aims to reconstruct the lost home and protects an absolute truth of the past. The document also discusses how nostalgia has been understood as a disease and how it is influenced by present needs and can impact the future. It examines nostalgia as an historical emotion tied to institutions that preserve the past and explores nostalgia's relationship to other concepts like retro and off-modern

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Will Kurlinkus
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432 views

Nostalgia 1

This document discusses different types and understandings of nostalgia. It begins by defining nostalgia as a "longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed" involving feelings of loss and displacement as well as fantasy. It then distinguishes between reflective nostalgia, which delays return home and calls the past into doubt, and restorative nostalgia, which aims to reconstruct the lost home and protects an absolute truth of the past. The document also discusses how nostalgia has been understood as a disease and how it is influenced by present needs and can impact the future. It examines nostalgia as an historical emotion tied to institutions that preserve the past and explores nostalgia's relationship to other concepts like retro and off-modern

Uploaded by

Will Kurlinkus
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Nostalgia

Dr. Will Kurlinkus


1. What do we know about nostalgia
from earlier readings?
2. Give me 3 examples of different
types of nostalgia.
• Nostos: to return home + Algia: longing
Nostalgia and Its • Nostalgia: “A longing for a home that no longer exists
or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and

Discontents displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own


fantasy.”
• Q. What does it mean for nostalgia to be understood as a
disease—that Civil War soldiers were listed as dying from
nostalgia?

• “The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of


the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the
future.”
• “The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the
actual home and the imaginary one.”

• “Nostalgia as a historical emotion came of age during


the time of Romanticism and is coeval with the birth of
mass culture. In the mid-nineteenth century, nostalgia
became institutionalized in national and provincial
museums, heritage foundations, and urban memorials.
The past was no longer unknown or unknowable.”

• Melancholia vs. Retro vs. Nostalgia


• Off-Modern: “a detour into the unexplored potentials
of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and
ventures into the side alleys of modern history at the
margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and
technological narratives of modernization and progress.”
Reflective vs. • Restorative: attempts a
transhistorical reconstruction of the
Restorative Nostalgia lost home
• Reflective: thrives on algia (the
longing itself) and delays the
homecoming—wistfully, ironically,
deperately
• “Restorative nostalgia protects the
absolute truth, while reflective
nostalgia calls it into doubt. “
• “Nostalgia can be a poetic creation,
an individual mechanism of survival,
a countercultural practice, a poison,
or a cure. It is up to us to take
responsibility for our nostalgia and
not let others ‘prefabricate’ it for us.”
What is Nostalgia?
(Grafton Tanner)
Emotions: “Intense reactions to certain events….Emotional management is
constrained by historical, cultural, situational, and relational norms” (23).
Affect: the physiological feeling pre-interpretation. Longing before
we reflect on what we are longing for—think restorative nostalgia.
(i) Noxious stimuli, as general as avoidance motivation and as specific
as self- threat (negative performance feedback), existential threat
(meaninglessness, mortality awareness), social threat (loneliness) . . .
intensify felt nostalgia; (ii) in turn, nostalgia . . . [protects] the self from
threat, limiting defensive responding to meaninglessness, assuaging
existential anxiety, repairing interpersonal isolation, diminishing the
blow of stress. (Sedikides et al190)
• “The west no longer dreams of utopia but of retrotopia, a utopia in the
past, where security”
• Bowling Alone: Do all adults inevitably experience nostalgia.
Statistically people over thirty have fewer and fewer close friends
(Williams). Work, children, moving, and general awkwardness
combine with a decrease in play-oriented local events like bowling
leagues, block parties, and sewing circles, to destroy adults’ abilitities
to meet the three conditions of meaningful friendship once so easy in
childhood: “proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a
setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide
in each other” (Williams)
The Odyssey
When was the last
time you were
nostalgic?
What’s the difference
between nostalgia and
simple positive
memory?
Tell me about this
Buzzfeed listacle? Why
are people obsessed
with nostalgia lists?
The Nostalgia Industry
If you had to
study nostalgia
today? How
would you do it?

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