Of Memory and Literary Form

Of Memory and Literary Form PDF Author: Kyle Pivetti
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book opens with a crisis of recollection. In the early modern period, real political traumas like civil war and regicide exacerbated what were already perceived ruptures in myths of English descent. William Camden and other scholars had revealed that the facts of history could not justify the Arthurian myths, nor could history itself guarantee any moment of collective origin for the English people. Yet poets and playwrights concerned with the status of the emerging nation state did not respond with new material evidence. Instead, they turned to the literary structures that—through a range of what the author calls mnemonic effects—could generate the experience of a collective past. As Sir Philip Sidney recognized, verse depends upon the repetitions of rhyme and meter; consequently poetry “far exceedeth prose in the knitting up of memory.” These poetic and linguistic forms expose national memory as a construction at potential odds with history, for memory operates like language—through a series of signifiers that acquire new meaning as one rearranges and rereads them. Moving from the tragedy Gorboduc (1561) to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Pivetti shows how such “knitting up of memory” created the shared pasts that generate nationhood. His work implies that memory emerges not from what actually occurred, but from the forms that compose it. Or to adapt the words of Paul Ricoeur: “we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place.” The same is true even when that “something” is nationhood.

Of Memory and Literary Form

Of Memory and Literary Form PDF Author: Kyle Pivetti
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book opens with a crisis of recollection. In the early modern period, real political traumas like civil war and regicide exacerbated what were already perceived ruptures in myths of English descent. William Camden and other scholars had revealed that the facts of history could not justify the Arthurian myths, nor could history itself guarantee any moment of collective origin for the English people. Yet poets and playwrights concerned with the status of the emerging nation state did not respond with new material evidence. Instead, they turned to the literary structures that—through a range of what the author calls mnemonic effects—could generate the experience of a collective past. As Sir Philip Sidney recognized, verse depends upon the repetitions of rhyme and meter; consequently poetry “far exceedeth prose in the knitting up of memory.” These poetic and linguistic forms expose national memory as a construction at potential odds with history, for memory operates like language—through a series of signifiers that acquire new meaning as one rearranges and rereads them. Moving from the tragedy Gorboduc (1561) to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Pivetti shows how such “knitting up of memory” created the shared pasts that generate nationhood. His work implies that memory emerges not from what actually occurred, but from the forms that compose it. Or to adapt the words of Paul Ricoeur: “we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place.” The same is true even when that “something” is nationhood.

The Fragmenting Force of Memory

The Fragmenting Force of Memory PDF Author: Norman Saadi Nikro
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443839558
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This study is about experimental forms of cultural production that situate and work through personal experiences of the civil war in Lebanon. It addresses selected works of literature, autobiography and memoir by Jean Said Makdisi, Rashid al-Daif, Elias Khoury and Mai Ghoussoub, and the civil war trilogy of documentary films by Mohamed Soueid. From a phenomenological hermeneutic perspective, the book is concerned with how they give accounts of themselves as remnants, leftovers and undigested remains of the civil war, and of related trajectories of ideological attachment to symbolic mandates. Constrained to reposition their sense of self from an agent of history to a casualty of history, their acutely personal works of cultural production initiate an unraveling of both self and circumstance through the fragmenting force of memory. Drawing on a broad range of phenomenological critical theory (within the research fields of postcolonial, memory, psychoanalytic, gender and literary studies) attuned to subjectivity as a field of social production and exchange, emphasis is given to how the writers and filmmaker employ a non-presentist, anachronic or paratactic register of memory to excavate both a historical understanding of self and related modalities of social viability. This concerns how the symptomatic style of their work embodies, and creatively and critically situates, a refusal to package and normailze any idealized account of the war, related assemblages of temporal succession, or a presentation of self as discrete and omniscient.

Literature and Cultural Memory

Literature and Cultural Memory PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900433887X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied. High and low culture as texts embedded in the texture of memory, as well as material culture as a communal receptacle and reservoir of memory are analysed in their historical contingency. Symbolic representations of accepted and counter history/ies, and the cultural nodes and mechanisms of the cultural imaginary are also issues of central interest. Twenty-six contributions tackle these topics from a theoretical and historical perspective and bring to the fore case studies illustrating the interdisciplinary agenda that underlies the volume. Contributors: Luis Manuel A.V. Bernardo, Lina Bolzoni, Peter Burke, Pia Brinzeu, Adina Ciugureanu, Thomas Docherty, Christoph Ehland, Herbert Grabes, László Gyapay, Donna Landry, Christoph Lehner, Gerald MacLean, Dragoş Manea, Daniel Melo, Mirosława Modrzewska, Rareş Moldovan, C.W.R.D. Mosely, Petruţa Năiduţ, Francesca Orestano, Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Andreea Paris, Leonor Santa Bárbara, Hans-Peter Söder, Jukka Tiusanen, Ludmila Volná, Ioana Zirra.

The Promise of Memory

The Promise of Memory PDF Author: Lorna Martens
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674275098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Readers once believed in Proust’s madeleine and in Wordsworth’s recollections of his boyhood—but that was before literary culture began to defer to Freud’s questioning of adult memories of childhood. In this first sustained look at childhood memories as depicted in literature, Lorna Martens reveals how much we may have lost by turning our attention the other way. Her work opens a new perspective on early recollection—how it works, why it is valuable, and how shifts in our understanding are reflected in both scientific and literary writings. Science plays an important role in The Promise of Memory, which is squarely situated at the intersection of literature and psychology. Psychologists have made important discoveries about when childhood memories most often form, and what form they most often take. These findings resonate throughout the literary works of the three writers who are the focus of Martens’ book. Proust and Rilke, writing in the modernist period before Freudian theory penetrated literary culture, offer original answers to questions such as “Why do writers consider it important to remember childhood? What kinds of things do they remember? What do their memories tell us?” In Walter Benjamin, Martens finds a writer willing to grapple with Freud, and one whose writings on childhood capture that struggle. For all three authors, places and things figure prominently in the workings of memory. Connections between memory and materiality suggest new ways of understanding not just childhood recollection but also the artistic inclination, which draws on a childlike way of seeing: object-focused, imaginative, and emotionally intense.

On History and Memory in Arab Literature and Western Poetics

On History and Memory in Arab Literature and Western Poetics PDF Author: Bootheina Majoul
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527560422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Texts act like receptacles for an ever-present remembered past, or what the French philosopher Paul Ricœur calls “the present representation of an absent thing”. They might embody an efficient remedy to forgetting but could also become a vivid testimony for exorcised traumas. This volume focuses on Ricœur’s phenomenology of memory, epistemology of history, and hermeneutics of forgetting. A special emphasis is laid on the dissension between individual and collective institutional memory.

Memory in Culture

Memory in Culture PDF Author: A. Erll
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230321674
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This book questions the sociocultural dimensions of remembering. It offers an overview of the history and theory of memory studies through the lens of sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, literature, art and media studies; documenting current international and interdisciplinary memory research in an unprecedented way.

Trauma and Literature

Trauma and Literature PDF Author: J. Roger Kurtz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316821277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.

In Memory of Memory

In Memory of Memory PDF Author: Maria Stepanova
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228843
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Cultural Memory and Literature

Cultural Memory and Literature PDF Author: Diane Molloy
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004304088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Cultural memory involves a community’s shared memories, the selection of which is based on current political and social needs. A past that is significant to a national group is re-imagined by generating new meanings that replace earlier certainties and fixed symbols or myths. This creates literary syncretisms with moments of undecidability. The analysis in this book draws on Renate Lachmann’s theory of intertextuality to show how novels that blur boundaries without standing in for history are prone to intervene in cultural memory. A brief overview of Aboriginal politics between the 1920s and the 1990s in relation to several novels provides historical and political background to the links between, and problems associated with, cultural memory, testimony, trauma, and Stolen Generations narratives, which are discussed in relation to Sally Morgan’s My Place and Doris Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence. There follows an analysis of novels that respond to the history of contact between Aboriginal and settler Australians, including Kate Grenville’s historical novels The Secret River, The Lieutenant, and Sarah Thornhill as examples of a traditional approach. David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon charts how language and naming defined our early national narrative that excluded Aboriginal people. Intertextuality is explored via the relation between Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man, and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Kim Scott’s Benang: from the heart and That Deadman Dance and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria reflect a number of Lachmann’s concepts – syncretism, dialogism, polyphony, Menippean satire, and the carnivalesque. Suggested is a new way of reading novels that respond to Australia’s violent past beyond trauma studies and postcolonial theory to re-imagine a different, syncretic past from multiple perspectives.

The Art of Flight

The Art of Flight PDF Author: Sergio Pitol
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1941920063
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Debut work in English, a literary memoir, by Sergio Pitol, maestro of Mexican literature, winner of the 2005 Cervantes Prize.