Tag Archives: Memory Studies

Memory in Literature

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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

Journalism and Memory

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The 25th book in the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, Journalism and Memory, has been published and is available here.

This series also includes amongst its titles:

Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory

Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy and Nostalgia

Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming

The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice

History, Memory and Migration: Perspectives of the Past and Politics of Incorporation

Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society

A description of Journalism and Memory is provided below:

Although journalism has always been an important vehicle of collective memory, it has been neglected in discussions about how memory works. This fascinating book aims to correct that disjuncture, by tracking the ways in which journalism and shared memory mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other. How is journalism’s address to memory different from that of other institutions? What would the study of memory look like without journalism? And how would our understanding of journalism fall short without paying attention to memory? Bringing together leading scholars in journalism and memory studies, this collection makes explicit the longstanding and complicated role that journalism has played in keeping the past alive. From anniversary issues and media retrospectives to simple verbal and visual analogies connecting past and present, journalism incorporates an address to earlier times across the wide array of its conventions and practices. How it does so and which triumphs and problems ensue in our understanding of collective memory constitute the charter of this volume.