Norman Klein

Norman M. Klein was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. He began his academic career with stops along the way at the University of California, Los Angeles, Otis College, Southern California Institute of Architecture and the University of Southern California. A historian in the fields of architecture, media, and culture, he has been a Professor of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts for over thirty years. Memory and all of its socially relevant functions are at the core of...See more

Norman M. Klein was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. He began his academic career with stops along the way at the University of California, Los Angeles, Otis College, Southern California Institute of Architecture and the University of Southern California. A historian in the fields of architecture, media, and culture, he has been a Professor of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts for over thirty years. Memory and all of its socially relevant functions are at the core of Klein's interests. By exploring a multitude of issues and themes, Klein pursues traces of the past and critically investigates how selective the memory is and how facts and fiction are combined in history. In doing so, Klein moves between various genres and techniques. "The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory" (1997) is a "melding of archival research with critical theory," as observed by the media researcher Peter Lunenfeld. "Klein cannot help but transgress: he moves from personal memoir to a theoretical exegesis; binds between two covers essays, a novella, and a form he calls the >docufable See less