Time Passages : Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

In "Time passages", George Lipsitz explores the complicated relationship in postwar America between historical memory and commercial culture, between the texts of popular culture and their contexts of creation and reception. Arguing that a "crisis of memory" lies at the heart of modern culture, he demonstrates how popular culture and history are linked in a selective (and paradoxical) process of remembering and forgetting. Popular television, music and film baffle those critics trained in traditional modes of aesthetic criticism. In Lipsitz's hands, however, the texts of popular culture prove to be sophisticated repositories of historical knowledge; in his words, the sideshow becomes the main event. "George Lipsitz is Associate Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota.".