Nostalgia

Isn't what it used to be. A portmanteau of the Greek words nostos ("return home") and algos ("pain"), the term was coined in the late 18th century as a fancy translation for German Heimweh. The condition prevailed in Romanticism; the literary critic Jean Starobinski has theorised a connection between homesickness and the increasing likelihood of being away from home (due to urbanisation and new means of transport).

Since the early 20th century, nostalgia has meant a longing for the past - the desire to be in a different time rather than place.

Several theorists describe nostalgia as a key characteristic of postmodern culture. Fredric Jameson argues that the past has become a commodity and is subjected to the capitalist rule of fast money through changing fashions. The present therefore colonises the past, defining "1930-ness" or "1950-ness" according to its own needs: "nostalgia entails cannibalization of all the styles of the past" (18). As a consequence, postmodernity is out of touch with its history, which is eliminated by glossy images, the surface signs of fashion: "the history of aesthetic styles displaces 'real' history" (20). In a similar vein, Jean Baudrillard diagnoses a "nostalgia for a lost referential" (44); for him, this is a symptom of hyperreality, the void in which signs point to nothing but other signs (rather than actual referents).

By contrast, Linda Hutcheon claims that postmodernism is "aware of the risks and lures of nostalgia, and seek[s] to expose those through irony." As with all postmodern parody, this is not an easy task: if we quote something ironically, we still quote it, and so the double coding of irony (subversion and legitimation, criticism and complicity) comes into play.

In her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues that the nostalgic look back can function as a critique of our fast-paced world and the notion of time as a one-way street to progress; it opens up alternatives for the future.

Sources

• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1994.
• Hutcheon, Linda. "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern." 19 January 1998. <http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html>.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
• "Nostalgia (noun)." Oxford Dictionary of English. Ed. Angus Stevenson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.