Literatures Of Memory

A novelist and a neuroscientist uncover the secrets of human memory. What makes us remember? Why do we forget? And what, exactly, is a memory? With playfulness and intelligence, Adventures in Memory answers these questions and more, offering an illuminating look at one of our most fascinating faculties. The authors—two Norwegian sisters, one a neuropsychologist and the other an acclaimed writer—skillfully interweave history, research, and exceptional personal stories, taking readers on a captivating exploration of the evolving understanding of the science of memory from the Renaissance discovery of the hippocampus—named after the seahorse it resembles—up to the present day. Mixing metaphor with meta-analysis, they embark on an incredible journey: “diving for seahorses” for a memory experiment in Oslo fjord, racing taxis through London, and “time-traveling” to the future to reveal thought-provoking insights into remembering and forgetting. Along the way they interview experts of all stripes, from the world’s top neuroscientists to famous novelists, to help explain how memory works, why it sometimes fails, and what we can do to improve it. Filled with cutting-edge research and nimble storytelling, the result is a charming—and memorable—adventure through human memory.

This book is the first to discover and probe in depth memory phenomena captured in literary works. Using literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, this comparative study of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz, including Proust, Breton, Woolf and Faulkner, uncovers valuable material for the classification of the memory process. Nalbantian's daring interdisciplinary work, involving literature, science, and art, forges a new model for dialogue between the disciplines.

Not only do drama and poetry about the past and historical novels reveal a shared understanding of pivotal moments, historical figures, and every life of earlier times, say Middleton (English, U. of Southampton) and Woods (English, U. of Wales-Aberystwyth), they also outline more general beliefs about the past and its relation to the present. It is.

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.

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.

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.

This edited book considers the need for the continued dismantling of conceptual and cultural hegemonies of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the humanities and social sciences. Cutting across a wide range of literature, film and art from different contexts and ages, this collection seeks out the interpenetrating dynamic between both terms. Highlighting the inherent instability of East and West as oppositional categories, it focuses on the ‘crossings’ between East and West and this nexus as a highly-charged arena of encounter and collision. Drawing from varied literary contexts ranging from Victorian literature to Chinese literature and modern European literature, the book covers a diverse range of subject matter, including material drawn from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and studies related to race, religion, diaspora, and gender, and investigates topical social and political issues —including terrorism, nationalism, citizenship, the refugee crisis, xenophobia and otherness. Offering a framework to consider the salient questions of cultural, ideological and geographical change in our societies, this book is a key read for those working within world literary studies.

Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels that this book analyses withdraw from overt memory discourses and create new ways of re-membering that refigure the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is ‘memorable’ in the first place. Combining the analysis of the novels’ overall structure with close readings of selected passages, this book links latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level, activating readers to challenge their learned ways of reading for memory.