Francis OGorman - Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia

Praise for

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History

Francis OGorman offers a witty, philosophical meditation on the meaning of worry, where it comes from and how it came to be our constant companion ... Although the visual arts and music can provide temporary distraction for the worrier, we need wordsfragile, unstable wordsto express it. Thankfully OGorman has given us some more.

Liz Hoggard, The Independent

In his highly anxious but very valuable new book, Francis OGorman seeks to pin down worry as an idea and to record the stories we tell ourselves about it; he sets worrying in both its recent and its deeper cultural history, and he also contemplates the various ways writers and artists have dealt with worry as a category of experience ... Worrying also fits into the tradition of breaking down myths and tropes into discrete units, a bit like Mircea Eliades Myth and Reality or C. S. Lewiss Studies in Words. We care about these books because we need stories about the cultural past so that we might have a sense of ourselves in time. The real value of OGormans book lies, I think, in the way it flags the politics of the stories we tell ourselves.

Josephine Livingstone, New Republic

[An] affectionate tribute to low-level fretting ... Mr OGorman is a pleasant and good-humored guide, and his candid, self-effacing style helps mitigate any boredom. If there is a message, it addresses the ever-expanding cottage industry around happiness and wellbeing ... Mr OGormans celebration of the wonderful eccentricity of human nature is both refreshing and necessary.

The Economist

The best parts of this book, as you would hope from a literary critic, are the textual readings. OGorman doesnt just provide illuminating discussions of worry literature ... He also reads worry per se as a literary trope, a comedy of mental manners in which its victims are like stage characters trapped in their humors, always enacting the same scenes and parroting the same catchphrases. He is often dryly funny himself ... While it failed to assuage any of my worries, this winning little book still made me root for and, yes, worry a little for its author. I hope this review stops him fretting for a bit, at least until the next worry arrives.

Joe Moran, The Guardian

An engagingly personal quest to find out what [worry] means, both for good and bad ... [S]ome of the most striking parts of this book are those in which [OGorman] shares some illuminating intuition about worrythat it can be a species of self-indulgence, a way of extending ego into a conversation, or of somehow confirming selfness in the head; or that worriers might, deep down, think too highly of themselves, believe that they are too good to err and certainly too good to admit errors or apologize for them.

Catherine Morris, Times Literary Supplement

It is worth reading for many reasons, but surely because it treats worrying as a complex issue, that is to say, as a feeling that might have a lot of good stuff to be said about it. Worrying works because its not all doom and gloom, it avoids self-pity, and manages to have both an intellectual and personal discussion of an emotional issue from various and surprising angles.

Charlie Pullen, The Bookbag

It is 4.06 am. Francis OGorman is in bed. His partner and three cats lie fast asleep beside him. But he is awake, worrying. So begins this subtle, exploratory, completely original book.

John Carey, The Sunday Times

[An] intelligent and probing study.

James Williams, The Tablet

In some enjoyably subversive pages, [OGorman] unpicks a few of modernitys best-loved fairy tales.

Dan Hitchens, The Spectator

Worrying is not a self-help book. In fact, it frequently pokes holes in that genre. Nor is the book spiritual in any sense. As the books subtitle suggests, this is a literary and cultural history, as well as a personal one (OGorman is a self-confessed worrier). The book is an exercise in worrying about worry.

Karen Swallow Prior, Christianity Today

Keeping us up with his sleepless stressesdid I forget to lock the door downstairs?Francis OGorman comes to think that such anxieties, rather than being just a niggling malfunction, might also represent a constructive aspect of the human condition. Whats the use of worrying?

Rachel Bowlby, Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA, and author of A Child of Ones Own: Parental Stories

Francis OGorman, from English, Irish, and Hungarian families, was born in 1967 and educated as C. S. Deneke Organ Scholar of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where he took a double first and a doctorate in English literature. He is the author or editor of 23 books, mostly on English literature, and of essays on literature, music, and the condition of the modern English university. His Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (Bloomsbury, 2015), described by John Carey as subtle, exploratory, completely original, was a Guardian Book of the Week, a Sunday Times Must Read, and one of Bookbags History Books of the Year, 2015. For a decade, Francis OGorman held a chair in the School of English at the University of Leeds; he is now Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. When not working, he likes playing the organ, walking Arthurs Seat, or sitting in a bar.

Forgetfulness

Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia

Francis OGorman

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Contents