In recent years, cultural memory studies have devoted more and more
attention to the imaginative and future-oriented aspects of memory. Many
contemporary scholars, such as Michael Rothberg (2009) and Max
Silverman (2013), have stressed the close relationship between memory
and imagination, and they have drawn attention to memory’s capacity to
build new solidarities. Also, Anna Reading (2002, 186) criticizes a
hegemonic view of memory as separate from imagination. According to her,
late capitalist Western cultures seem obsessed with memory and
remembering. Its dominant conceptualization of memory is based on a
sequential and teleological view of time underpinned by an either/or
logic common to Western philosophical traditions. Thus, memory is
distinct from fantasy and is conceived as being in relation to another
aspect of the past—history. Literature and art more widely have great
potential in imagining and dreaming of possible lives, and particularly
artists of the younger generation have been increasingly interested in
the imaginative potential of the past. Changes in the forms of cultural
remembrance and the rise of the new memory studies started after the
generation who had experienced the Holocaust began to fade away and
media products became the only means of making experience available to
others (Erll 2008, 9). This creative force of memory is noticeable in
many conceptualizations of memory in the new century, such as postmemory
(Marianne Hirsch) and prosthetic memory (Alison Landsberg).