When speaking of the cultural memory of a society, we discuss select content from the cultural past of the given society that it has elevated to the highest ranks in its apparatus of knowledge, myth, and power. This is also related to the hierarchy and constellation of the set of relations and knowledge that trickle down from that pinnacle, through the education system and public usage, becoming the self-comprehensible foundation of a socially-active identity. This steadfast mechanism of reproduction of social relations and knowledge survives, similar to orientation habits and opinion matrices, greatly thwarting their reevaluation.

In her book, Celebrated and Ignored: Towards a Critical Culture of Remembering, Svetlana Tomić deconstructs precisely the opinion matrix and governing mechanisms that determine the balance of powers and issues of truth in Serbian and South Slavic cultural memory. The study starts from the standpoint of the truthfulness of remembrance, and the order in it, by verifying the reliability of academic knowledge that actually produced that memory. The selected standpoint includes shedding light on the nexus of normativistics and patriarchal ideology, with focus on the normativistic denial of the significance and memory of celebrated women, as well as the issue of the eradication of the intellectual heritage and current production of women by other women. This systematic endeavor resulted in the analysis of the weaknesses and the selective devastation of academic knowledge, so that we would finally arrive at a persuasive document on the strategically-persistent fostering of ignorance about the intellectual contributions of women, and the mechanism of the institutionalization of counterfeit knowledge as society's important knowledge, thus depriving half of the population of its intelligence and historical subjectivity.

Prominent female authors and scientist have not been forgotten but rather systematically and consistently ignored—this is the main thesis of this book. Forgetfulness is the euphemism for conscious non-recognition, belittling, and removal of women from literary and intellectual history, something that the author does not accept. Furthermore, Tomić resolutely opposes the euphemism “forgetfulness,” contemplating it in the sense of an excuse that abolishes and corroborates the perpetual discrimination of the intellectual creativity of women. “Forgetfulness” is a seemingly banal, but actually offensive and dangerous rhetorical shelter from the durability of the negative selection and double standards of evaluation in the violent competition of mediocracy and the male-centered worldview.

Male monopoly in the sphere of creativity evaluation, with the given worldview, has led to the issue of the continuous overlooking, blocking, and expunging of the intellectual creativity of women not being perceived as a problem because of its persistence and ubiquity. This is a “state of affairs” that is not causing any objection, but rather is being served and abided by. Tomić raises the issue of the comprehension of cultural memory precisely from the perspective of an unchangeable “state of affairs,” and not only from the standpoint of the ignored and expunged content. She challenges it in the domain of education, in literary and historical readers, the culture of monuments, and memorization, where cultural memory is the safest and where it is otherwise capitalized symbolically.

The methods that the author uses are descriptive, comparative, historical, cumulative, and statistical. The established literary canon is questioned, from the perspective of the part of cultural creation that is not presented in it, which was falsified or had been expunged. In clarifying the huge discrepancy between the reality of female authors’ existence and ignorant norms, the simplest models proved to be the most efficient. The comparative review of the representation of female authors in literary histories over time (from the early twentieth century to the present), clearly shows that with the passing of time the number of women in them has decreased. One history of Serbian literature published in 2011 recoded one. Another work published that same year did not mention a single female author. Recent histories have ignored the achievements of once-celebrated female authors the same way that Jovan Skerlić, the author of the first history of Serbian literature in the early twentieth century expunged Queen Natalija Obrenović as the author of the first book of aphorisms in Serbia, consciously denying the link between a woman and the history of generally-accepted wisdom (38).

The canon established on eradicating, counterfeiting, and officially covering up the creativity of women, as if it was something disgraceful for the community, has in the past hundred years been conserved in an even more rigid form by the strengthening of the notorious dogma that creativity worth remembering is produced solely by men.