ABSTRACT
In “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Paul de Man fastens upon a particular type of forgetting as part of the core experience of modernity. He invites us to consider “the idea of modernity” as consisting in
a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that would be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. This combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with an action that is also a new origin reaches the full power of the idea of modernity. (de Man, qtd. in Connerton 1989: 61)
[T]he very principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. It denies credence to the thought that the life of an individual or a community either can or should derive its value from acts of consciously performed recall, from the reliving of the prototypical. (de Man, qtd. in Connerton 1989: 64)
This “modernity,” moreover, this new “Enlightened” Age celebrated reason, science and rationalism, and the individual, putting to rest ancient belief systems, now redesignated “primitive” or “superstitious,” that celebrated the continuity of life through renewal and regeneration.
