Description
Book SynopsisNostalgia, supposedly, is the sphere of the sentimentalist. But also, and most definitely, it is a force in the creation of the present and future and thus worth careful thought.
Yesterday argues that nostalgia’s critics defend an idea of progress as naïve as the longing they denounce, while conflating nostalgia itself with historical whitewashing.
Trade ReviewDespite the scorn that electoral politics may profess toward nostalgia, we practice it culturally all the time.
Yesterday takes us through endless artistic revivals throughout the past half century, a period during which, as technology frog-marched us into the future, we kept a constant backward glance. -- Thomas Mallon * New Yorker *
[
Yesterday] begins by charting the evolution of the concept of nostalgia, from its genesis as a medical diagnosis related to homesickness to a more abstract yearning for a rosier past to one of its many current usages, as an insult levied at anyone believed to be an opponent of progress. But by the end,
Yesterday stands as a profound statement about how humans exist in time and live with the past. -- Joe Keohane * Boston Globe *
Offers an insightful and erudite deflation of nostalgia in popular culture. -- Andrew Stark * Wall Street Journal *
The range of social, political and cultural phenomena covered is impressive and the author’s reconstructions of them absorbing. -- Scott McLemee * Inside Higher Education *
An elegant, original, enjoyable, and important investigation of the concept of nostalgia and its power. From Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ to Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia,’ Becker shows that the ‘problem’ with nostalgia has never been the peculiar ways it engages with the past. Instead, it is the way nostalgia contests assumptions about progress. After
Yesterday, nostalgia really isn’t what it used to be. -- Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University
Sha Na Na performed ‘At the Hop’ at Woodstock, six months to the day after the inauguration of the new law-and-order president, Richard Nixon. In his wide-ranging yet incisive book, Tobias Becker explains how two such disparate events could seem to belong to a single history of ‘nostalgia.’ -- Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois
With nostalgia seemingly everywhere these days, this history of the concept since the mid-twentieth century hits the spot. Its exploration of pop culture is particularly fascinating: refuting critics who see retro revivals as signs of cultural stagnation, Becker shows that nostalgia has been a source of creative inspiration since the 1960s. -- Julia Sneeringer, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Western cultural critics have been lamenting our loss of optimism and our obsession with the past ever since the 1970s. Why? In his lucid history of arguments about nostalgia, Tobias Becker reveals their unacknowledged clinging to the idea of progress, an idea we seem unable to overcome. -- Philipp Felsch, Humboldt University of Berlin
