Mnemosyne

Memory is our most treasured asset. Seldom has such a complex subject been presented in a compelling narrative, where the intellect, the curious, and the recipient of horrific memories can grasp its meaning. Mnemosyne: A Love Affair with Memory is such a story. The two main characters, Larry L. Franklin and Richard Semon, lived in different centuries on opposite sides of the world, with memory as the common obsession that ties the two stories together. Franklin was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder brought on by physical and sexual childhood abuse. He had lived for decades without knowing the cause of his misery. If not for his mother's revelations, he might never have seen the memories that nearly cost him his sanity. Long-term therapy, self-exploration, and an able psychotherapist brought him back from the dark side. Richard Semon was a world-renowned nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist. His reputation crumbled when he fell in love with a fellow professor's wife, who chose to leave her husband and children for a life with Richard. The university fired Richard, his peers turned away, and the one-time-professor turned private-thinker/philosopher dedicated the remainder of his life to the study of memory. Peer rejection and the later death of his wife drove Richard into a deep depression followed by suicide. This is a work of creative nonfiction written in the form of a hybrid memoir. The complexities of memory, together with the mysteries of a spiritual journey, yearned for an approach different from the strictly fact-based, nonmetaphorical strategies most common in nonfiction. Long before the written word, the ancient Greeks conveyed the complications of mortal life and left veiled advice for future generations through stories, myths, and legends. They brought human qualities and quests to life through the exploits of an assortment of gods, goddesses, and other mythological creatures. Even now, artists sometimes use Greek mythology to explain the seemingly unexplainable. I chose Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as a conduit for the deeper, more abstract aspects of my own and Richard Semon's navigation of the spiritual world. Personifying memory as the Greeks did seemed appropriate to my quest, as it was to Richard Semon's. Writers of memoir depend on their relationship to memory, are smitten with it, are obsessed by it, and chase it down the halls of recollection, always in pursuit of an entity that disappears around every next corner, much like an elusive lover who bids the beloved to come hither, but who then flees, disappearing and reappearing in a seemingly endless chase. When memory finally turns to face the one chasing her, the embrace can be both wonderful and terrible. This was so for Richard Semon, and it was so for me. Memory reaches back in time and challenges the accuracy of what one recalls in that embrace. I wrote what I remember; nothing more, nothing less.

Across this volume, readers encounter the author’s qualitative inquiry into the lives of women academics, including herself, who originated from working-class or poverty-class backgrounds. Unconventionally conveyed, these encounters take shape as a self-speculative critique of the author’s feminist research practice, moving readers into the folds of the work to consider what constructivist, poststructural, and material feminist theories and methodologies do to the story she was able to tell at the time that she told it.

The classic study of the timeless relationship between literature and the visual arts In his search for a common link between literature and the visual arts, Mario Praz draws on the abundant evidence of mutual understanding and correspondence they have long shared. Praz explains that within literature, each epoch has “its peculiar handwriting or handwritings, which, if one could interpret them, would reveal a character, even a physical appearance,” and while these characteristics belong to the general style of a given period, the personality of the writer does not fail to pierce through. Praz contends that something similar occurs in art. He shows how the likeness between the arts within various periods of history can ultimately be traced to structural similarities that arise out of the characteristic way in which the people of a certain epoch see and memorize facts aesthetically. Mnemosyne, at once the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses, presides over this view of the arts. In illustrating her influence, Praz ranges widely through Western sources, providing an incomparable tour of the literary and pictorial arts.

Editorial paper, Monica Centanni, Anna Fressola, Elizabeth Thomson Ernst H. Gombrich, Geburtstagsatlas: An Index of materials published in Engramma, by Seminario Mnemosyne Ernst H. Gombrich, Geburtstagsatlas für Max M. Warburg (1937). First digital edition, by Seminario Mnemosyne Ernst H. Gombrich, To Mnemosyne: An Introduction to Geburtstagsatlas (1937), by Seminario Mnemosyne Zwischenraum/Denkraum. Terminological Oscillations in the Introductions to the Atlas by Aby Warburg (1929) and Ernst Gombrich (1937), Victoria Cirlot “L’esprit de Warburg lui-même sera en paix”. A survey of Edgar Wind’s quarrel. With the Warburg Institute. Appendix: The Warburgkreis correspondence, Ianick Takaes de Oliveira A Review of Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London 1970). First digital edition, Edgar Wind A Laboratory of the Science of Culture. Review of A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (1933). First digital edition, Johan Huizinga. Edition and translation by Monica Centanni, Sergio Polano and Elizabeth Thomson Autobiography of a Warburgian Artist. Review of: Ronald B. Kitaj Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter (2017), Matias J. Nativo, Alessia Prati

Born in Chicago, Illinois, during the Great Depression, the fictionalized author narrates for his children the story of his life in the Twentieth Century. His account begins with the loss of innocence during childhood and concludes with realization of his pending last moments. It is an account which moves him from a life among a little known religious sect, The Brethren of Northern Illinois and Wisconsin, through some of the defining moments of the Twentieth Century as experienced by one who both reflects about, and acts upon that which is happening.