The contributors to this volume share a Poetics of Memory as the constant shift between representation in different kinds of cultural archives and its performance in various acts of cultural recollection. They are engaged in four main projects of mnemonic inquiry: The first deals with the history of the subject and the moment of recollection. The second opens the scope of an aesthetic reading of literary texts towards cultural memory in general. The third examines the nature of (literary) memory as such. The final group of contributors delimits the literary text towards intertextuality and electronic hypertext which challenges but also confirms the proposed Poetics of Memory
Diane Thompson's study focuses on the meaning and poetic function of memory in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and seeks to show how Dostoevsky used cultural memory to create a synthesis between his Christian ideal and art. Memory is considered not only as a theme or subject, but also as a principle of artistic composition.
How do poems remember? What kinds of memory do poems register that factual, chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to? What is the self created by such practices of memory? To answer these questions, Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of "poetic memory," a manner of thinking that eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject's intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise Glück, four American poets writing in a wide range of styles and discussed here for the first time together. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and thinkers from Nietzsche and Benjamin to Halbwachs and Kristeva, Gosmann uses these demanding poets to articulate an alternative, non-empirical model of the self in poetry.
This book explores new approaches towards developing memorial and heritage sites, moving beyond the critique of existing practices that have been the traditional focus of studies of commemoration. Offering understandings of the effects of conflict on memories of place, as manifested in everyday lives and official histories, it explores the formation of urban identities and constructed images of the city. Topographies of Memories suggests interdisciplinary approaches for creating commemorative sites with shared stakes. The first part of the book focuses on memory dynamics, the second on Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and the third on physical and material world interventions. Design practices and modes of engagement with places of memory are explored, making connections between theoretical explorations of memory and forgetting and practical strategies for designers and practitioners.
Texts act like receptacles for an ever-present remembered past, or what the French philosopher Paul Ricœur calls “the present representation of an absent thing”. They might embody an efficient remedy to forgetting but could also become a vivid testimony for exorcised traumas. This volume focuses on Ricœur’s phenomenology of memory, epistemology of history, and hermeneutics of forgetting. A special emphasis is laid on the dissension between individual and collective institutional memory.
Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory presents the first exhaustive treatment of the rhetorical use of description and memory in all the narrative works of the late 12th-century poet, Marie de France--the first woman to compose literary texts in French.
The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University
This title examines not only other writers' works with a critical eye, but also breaks boundaries in Simic's exploration of the outer and inner reaches of the human condition. Included here are essays on April Bernard, Robinson Jeffers, Donald Justice, Pablo Neruda, Gerald Stern, Richard Wilson, and more.
In 2002, Neil Whitehead published Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death, in which he applied the concept of poetics to the study of violence and observed the power of violence in the creation and expression of identity and social relationships. The Poetics of Processing applies Whitehead’s theory on violence to mortuary and skeletal assemblages in the Andes, Mexico, the US Southwest, Jordan, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Turkey, examining the complex cultural meanings of the manipulation of remains after death. The contributors interpret postmortem treatment of the physical body through a poetics lens, examining body processing as a mechanism for the re-creation of cosmological events and processing’s role in the creation of social memory. They analyze methods of processing and the ways in which the living use the physical body to stratify society and gain power, as evidenced in rituals of body preparation and burial around the world, objects buried with the dead and the hierarchies of tomb occupancy, the dissection of cadavers by medical students, the appropriation of living spaces once occupied by the dead, and the varying treatments of the remains of social outsiders, prisoners of war, and executed persons. The Poetics of Processing combines social theory and bioarchaeology to examine how the living manipulate the bodies of the dead for social purposes. These case studies—ranging from prehistoric to historic and modern and from around the globe—explore this complex material relationship that does not cease with physical death. This volume will be of interest to mortuary archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, and cultural anthropologists. Contributors: Dil Singh Basanti, Roselyn Campbell, Carlina de la Cova, Eric Haanstad, Scott Haddow, Christina Hodge, Christopher Knusel, Kristin Kuckelman, Clark Spencer Larsen, Debra Martin, Kenneth Nystrom, Adrianne Offenbecker, Megan Perry, Marin Pilloud, Beth K. Scaffidi, Mehmet Somel, Kyle D. Waller
In this volume, Gronas addresses the full range of psychological, social, and historical issues that bear on the mnemonic existence of modern literary works, particularly Russian literature. He focuses on the mnemonic processes involved in literary creativity, and the question of how our memories of past reading experiences shape the ways in which we react to literary works. The book also examines the concrete mnemonic qualities of poetry, as well as the social uses to which poetry memorization has historically been put to use. This study will appeal to scholars of cognitive poetics, Russian literature, and cultural studies.
