Memory's Fictions

Memory's Fictions
Author: Bienvenido N. Santos
Publisher:
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1993
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction

Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction
Author: Ylce Irizarry
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2016-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0252098072

In this new study, Ylce Irizarry moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. Irizarry establishes four dominant categories of narrative--loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory--that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As she shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins. An engaging contribution to an important literary tradition, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction privileges the stories Chicanas/os and Latinas/os remember about themselves rather than the stories of those subjugating them. NACCS Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, 2018; MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, Modern Language Association, 2017

History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction

History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction
Author: Beata Piątek
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: English fiction
ISBN: 9788323338246

History, memory and trauma as well as their complex interrelations have been lying at the centre of interdisciplinary academic debates since the end of the previous century. These are also themes with which contemporary writers and other artists are increasingly preoccupied in their work. History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction is an attempt at analysing the relationship between history, memory and trauma in the selected novels of Pat Barker, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro and John Banville. The author examines the notion of memory in a variety of contexts: collective memory in the historical novels of Barker and Barry, individual memory as a foundation of the sense of self in the novels of Banville and Ishiguro, and traumatic memory in the novels of Barry and Ishiguro. By applying the theoretical framework of trauma studies to the work of those renowned writers, History, Memory, Trauma offers new interpretations of their novels. The author demonstrates that contemporary fiction moves beyond mere representation of trauma and engages the reader in the role of co-witness who enables the process of working through trauma.

Palimpsestic Memory

Palimpsestic Memory
Author: Max Silverman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0857458841

The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of ‘palimpsestic memory’, which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction

Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction
Author: Lucy Bond
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2019-10-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135102616X

This book considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of ‘planetary memory’ able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. Authors examine the recent emergence of a literary and cultural imaginary of planetary memory, an imaginary which attempts to give form to the complex interrelations between human and non-human worlds, between local, national, and global concerns, and, perhaps most importantly, between historical and geological pasts, presents and futures. Chapters highlight distinct regions and landscapes of the US - from the Appalachians, to the South West, the Rust Belt, New York City, Alaska, New Orleans and the Rocky Mountains – in order to examine how the ecological, economic and historical specificity of these environments is underpinned by their implication on networks of planetary significance and scope. Overall, the collection aims to study, develop, and recognise new models of cultural memory and anxious anticipation as they emerge and evolve, thus opening new conversations about practices of remembering and remembrance on an increasingly fragile planet. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt

Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt
Author: L. Steveker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2015-12-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230248594

This book provides innovative readings of the key texts of A.S. Byatt's oeuvre by analysing the negotiations of individual identity, cultural memory, and literature which inform Byatt's novels. Steveker explores the concepts of identity constructed in the novels, showing them to be deeply rooted in British literary history and cultural memory.

History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction

History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction
Author: Kate Mitchell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2010-07-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230283128

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. Arguing that neo-Victorian fiction enacts and celebrates cultural memory, this book uses memory discourse to position these novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary.

Bridges to Memory

Bridges to Memory
Author: Maria Rice Bellamy
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2015-12-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813937973

Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory—a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences—Maria Bellamy examines narrative representations of this inherited form of trauma in the work of contemporary African American and ethnic American women writers. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.

The Weight of Memory

The Weight of Memory
Author: Shawn Smucker
Publisher: Revell
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1493430386

When Paul Elias receives a terminal diagnosis, he leaves his physician's office in a fog. Only one thing is clear to him: if he is going to die, he must find someone to watch over his granddaughter, Pearl, who has been in his charge since her drug-addicted father disappeared. Paul decides to take her back to Nysa--both the place where he grew up and the place where he lost his beloved wife under strange circumstances forty years earlier. But when he picks up Pearl from school, the little girl already seems to know of his plans, claiming a woman told her. In Nysa, Paul reconnects with an old friend but is not prepared for the onslaught of memory. And when Pearl starts vanishing at night and returning with increasingly bizarre tales, Paul begins to question her sanity, his own views on death, and the nature of reality itself. In this suspenseful and introspective story from award-winning author Shawn Smucker, the past and the present mingle like opposing breezes, teasing out the truth about life, death, and sacrifice.

Millennial Memory Perspectives in Jewish American Fiction

Millennial Memory Perspectives in Jewish American Fiction
Author: Heidi Schorr
Publisher: Georg Olms Verlag
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2017
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3487156458

Diese in englischer Sprache verfasste Dissertation fußt in den Feldern englische Literaturwissenschaft/Amerikanistik, Cultural Studies und Jewish American Studies. Sie untersucht die Repräsentation von Erinnerung in Werken von Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander und Nicole Krauss, Mitgliedern der sogenannten third generation jüdisch amerikanischer SchriftstellerInnen, welche um den Millenniumswechsel publizieren. Der Fokus liegt auf Werken von Nicole Krauss. Symbolische Charaktere und Objekte, welche in Verbindung zu Erinnerung stehen, werden herausgearbeitet und im Detail analysiert. This work is rooted in the fields of English Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, and Jewish American Studies. It examines memory representation in exemplary works published around the millennial change by third generation Jewish American writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander, and Nicole Krauss. The focus lies on the latter’s work. Symbolic characters and objects connected to memory are discerned and analyzed in detail.