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Seven types of forgetting

Paul Connerton

University of Cambridge, Paul.Connerton{at}ukonline.co.uk

Much of the debate on cultural memory has been shaped by the view, commonly held if not universal, that remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing. But this assumption is not self-evidently true. This article seeks, therefore, to disentangle the different types of acts that cluster together under the single term `to forget'. I suggest that we can distinguish at least seven types: repressive erasure; prescriptive forgetting; forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity; structural amnesia; forgetting as annulment; forgetting as planned obsolescence; forgetting as humiliated silence.

Key Words: identity • obsolescence • shame

Memory Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 59-71 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1750698007083889
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