Abstract
As Ramsey rightly points out in the opening chapter to her book, our mediated encounters with memories of historical events are rarely, if ever, limited to a single media or cultural form; rather, they are ‘dynamics composite[s] constructed by a range of media operating in combination’ (p. 1). This composite, ‘transmedia’ character of memory is routinely lost in existing research on media and memory, which tends to focus on a single medium and thereby misses the dynamic of the broader mediated mnemonic ecology. To counter this trend, Ramsey develops the idea of ‘transmedia structures’ and draws on approaches that understand memory in terms of an ecology that relies on fluid intertextual and intermedial networks. At the same time, she also emphasises the temporal, ‘procedural’ nature of such transmedia mnemonic structures, and examines how the changing mnemonic structures intersect with generations. To demonstrate the usefulness of her approach, Ramsey applies it to the study of World War II memory in the United States. She focuses on three forms of media that have played a central role in shaping the memory of the event over the last two decades – film, television, and digital games – and maps the ways in which the changing contours of memory intersected with two American generations: the wartime generation and the generation of the Baby Boomers. The empirical investigation focuses on a close reading of selected media texts, including the films Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), the series Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010), and first person shooter games like the Call of Duty: World at War (2008). It is somewhat unfortunate that the empirical part of the book follows a medium-by-medium chapter structure, as this tends to divert focus from the intermedial dynamics of memory formation. One is also left wondering how the mnemonic structures identified in different media texts intertwine with patterns of vernacular memory circulating among different generations. None of this, however, detracts from the strength of Ramsey’s conceptual framework, which deserves to be taken up and applied in future research on mediated memory.