Nothing Happened - Susan A. Crane

Nothing Happened

A History

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
264 Seiten
2024
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5036-4011-5 (ISBN)
17,45 inkl. MwSt
The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember.


"Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating.


When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered.


Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.

Susan A. Crane has been a professor of history at the University of Arizona since 1995. She is the author of Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (2000) and editor of Museums and Memory (2000) and The Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century (2020).

Introduction. Episodes in a History of Nothing

1. Studying How Nothing Happens

2. Nothing Is the Way It Was

3. Nothing Happened

Conclusion. There Is Nothing Left to Say

Erscheinungsdatum
Zusatzinfo 37 halftones
Verlagsort Palo Alto
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Kunst / Musik / Theater
Geisteswissenschaften Geschichte
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10 1-5036-4011-6 / 1503640116
ISBN-13 978-1-5036-4011-5 / 9781503640115
Zustand Neuware
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