Once Upon a Time: Nostalgic Narratives in Transition

The past has never seemed further away. The many tomorrows inherent in every new technology, product, and digitally mediated event drive us further away from our collective and individual histories. Yet our present seems nonetheless stubbornly rooted in the past, a past that has been dying very slowly for a very long time. Nostalgia, then, appears increasingly to be a modality with major potential for understanding how our now is shaped by our then, both individually and collectively. The past may be a foreign country but it is also inescapably our homeland, the place from which we attempt to emigrate but return to again and again is a series of personal and cultural nostalgic voyages which shape the line and weight of our own times and places. From the cinema to the TV screen, from the pages of the latest best-selling novel to the lines of the obscure academic poet, the powerful emotional and intellectual impact of the set of emotions, ideas, and associations linked to nostalgia are critical compositional devices.
To ignore this element of our aesthetic culture, or to condemn it outright as politically naïve and intellectually regressive, would be to miss, and thus misread, substantial portions of contemporary culture. Nostalgia and the nostalgic analysis of cultural products have enormous potential to help us understand the present.