Modern understandings of nostalgia sharply distinguish it from memory and often construe its relationship to the past as reactionary, fanciful, or retrograde. This dissertation reconsiders that valuation by engaging the formative sources that contribute to philosophical understandings of nostalgia and provide resources for thinking it otherwise. It reexamines time and memory in continental philosophy and U.S. cinema to argue that nostalgia does important work often overlooked in present conceptions, work that repositions relations with the past to generative, animating effect. The project analyzes the temporal issues nostalgia elicits, highlights its affective contours, and repositions its power to mediate and rework memory. It maintains that the role nostalgia plays in human experience is more propulsive than regressive, making it more attuned to time’s tensions and demands than previously thought.
Chapter one narrates the history of nostalgia, beginning with the work of Johannes Hofer. Origins in medical nosology establish a diagnostic frame of reference that grounds nostalgia’s reception as pathology while also revealing its persistent instabilities. Martin Heidegger and, especially, Jacques Derrida bring the temporal vectors of those instabilities into sharper focus. Chapter two shows how Heidegger’s work provides a useful understanding of time and moods, but ultimately remains tethered to a nostalgia for presence (nostos). Chapter three brings Derrida’s thinking on time and the trace into conversation with psychoanalysis to isolate a more capacious approach, one that indulges nostalgic desire but also frustrates it (algos).
The remaining chapters turn to film and develop an understanding of the moving image based on its ability to capture passing time, the eminent object of modern nostalgic experience. Chapter four engages critical literature on the uses of nostalgia in film and reconsiders George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), a pivotal work often reproached by critics and scholars. Chapter five advances a close reading of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) and his estranged relationship with philosophy. That relationship informs his work and often takes nostalgic recollection as an orienting concern. The film in question situates nostalgia as a propulsive screen affect that facilitates the work of mourning in the wake of loss and discontinuity. The dissertation concludes by sketching out horizons for future research and turning to insights contained in Augustine’s Confessions that further illustrate the form of nostalgia explored throughout.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42954 |
| Date | 30 August 2021 |
| Creators | Huggins, J. Blake |
| Contributors | Rambo, Shelly L., Petro, Anthony M. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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