The Constitution of the Cultural Memory

In the first half of the twentieth century, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, published a pioneering work on the social dimension of memory as well as the first considerations about the transmission of personal experience and of what a member of a collectivity heard. Although both emphasize the importance of oral communication,it is possible to glimpse, in both texts, the seed for what since the 1980’s began to be called “cultural memory”, a memory that’s not only created on thebasis of oral stories and the everyday inteaction —that is to say, the mediumof the voice— but through the use of various media. These allow to store anddivulge the versions of the past in larger spaces than those which constitute thememory surroundings of which Halbwachs talked. Jan Assmann describes th estabilization processes of cultural memory on which the various institutionsand media intervene, while Astrid Erll explores the dynamization processes of cultural memory that occur in our current mediatic societies through remediatizationand premediatization, as well as the biggest accessibility of electronicmedia for a wide audience. Thus, it is possible to articulate memory latenciesand to question hegemonic versions of the past