"It operates through what Mikhail Bakhtin called an "historical inversion": the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past. It is "memorialized" as past, crystallized into precious moments selected by memory, but also by forgetting, and by desire's distortions and reorganizations. Simultaneously distancing and proximating, nostalgia exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near. The simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed (and then experienced emotionally) in conjunction with the present--which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and confrontational. Nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from "the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal"--in other words, making it so very unlike the present. The aesthetics of nostalgia might, therefore, be less a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the invocation of a partial, idealized history merges with a dissatisfaction with the present. And it can do so with great force."(1)
"The ironizing of nostalgia, in the very act of its invoking, may be one way the postmodern has of taking responsibility for such responses by creating a small part of the distance necessary for reflective thought about the present as well as the past. "(1)
Bibliography:
(1) Hutcheon, Linda. "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern." University of Toronto English Library. Web. 3 Dec. 2010. .
This new way of looking at nostalgia is a direct correlation with how I look and think about the houses that I photograph since I sometimes come up with what it was like living in the house it is a made up past.
