In every experience, in every sense impression there is a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some irrationality, some ignorance, some fear, and whatever else, has worked on and contributed to it. That mountain over there! That cloud over there! What is ‘real’ about that? Subtract just once the phantasm and the whole human contribution from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your background, your past, your nursery school – all of your humanity and animality! There is no ‘reality’ for us (Nietzsche 1882, 57)
In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche poses the question; what happens to humanity when its memories, its very language, is stripped away? Memory is embedded not only in the acts of writing about the past, but in our very ability to understand such a past, and, in turn, to construct the foundations of our personal and social identities. In every action or impression there is some form of memory underwriting the experience, fleshing it out and constructing its meaning.
What happens when those memories are traumatic, forgotten, fraught with cultural aphasia? Who has the right to posses those memories, and to (re)articulate them to the world?
Here at Museums of Memory, we are interested in questioning what is memory? What role does it play in literary, artistic and historical narratives? How can it change our relationship to the world and ourselves?
Submit an 250-350 word abstract for our postgraduate research conference to memoryconf@gmail.com before the 31st March 2014.
Interesting Sources
Craig Raine discusses the influence of memory in literature in his article for the Guardian.
Catherine Jone’s Literary Memory provides an interesting discussion of the changing role of memory during the long eighteenth century.
Astrid Erll’s ‘Traumatic Pasts, Literary afterlives, and transcultural memory’ offers a useful discussion of new directions within literary and media studies
Jerome de Groot reviews Hester Lees-Jeffrey’s Shakespeare and Memory for the THE
References
Niezsche, Friedrich (1882) The Gay Science, ed Bernard Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001
Museums of Memory 