From Literature to Cultural Literacy

Naomi Segal, Daniela Koleva

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137429698
• eBook ISBN: 9781137429704
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Researchers in the new field of literary-and-cultural studies look at social issues – especially issues of change and mobility – through the lens of literary thinking. The essays range from cultural memory and migration to electronic textuality and biopolitics.

Part I

Remembering and Forgetting

1

Remembering and Forgetting: Introduction

Daniela Koleva

In the past couple of decades, European societies have experienced a real memory boom, starting with a series of national and international commemorations in the 1980s and gaining momentum with the deepening effects of decolonization and with the growing awareness of the withering away of Holocaust and World War II witnesses. Pierre Nora, who perhaps set the stage for this boom with his seminal Lieux de mémoire (1984), recently announced ‘l’avènement mondial de la mémoire’ [the global advent of memory] (Nora, 2004), and rightly so, for the interest in memory has been rapidly developing since the 1990s in post-communist, post-genocide, post-authoritarian, post-war and post-apartheid settings, from Cambodia to Argentina and from Russia to South Africa. The proliferation of contemporary media, especially the internet, has ensured a truly global visibility to these processes.

But these are not the only reasons for memory to have grown into a crucial issue of our day. In the last decades of the twentieth century, researchers in history recognized that what used to be thought of as objective ‘historical truth’ is in fact strongly influenced by ideological – political or religious – aesthetic, philosophical and other preconceptions. What is perceived as history varies according to the way memory is shaped through different techniques of remembering (depending on whether it is passed on orally or written down, what elements are deemed important and what are left out, and how facts and their relations are interpreted) and conveyed through different regimes and media (museums and archives, literature and art, film and photography, rituals and commemorations, objects and bodily practices).

Given its ubiquity and its ‘auratic status within and outside the academy’ (Radstone, 2008: 33), the concept of memory still looks deceptively simple and surprisingly under-theorized. Consequently, the field of memory studies is in an endlessly nascent state. In an article published in 2007, psychologist Endel Tulving enumerated 256 ‘kinds of memory’ (I am sure the list could have been longer then and certainly would be by now) to conclude that ‘[t]he term “memory” itself has become just an umbrella term [ . . . ], and one-time dreams of psychologists of coming up with a comprehensive “theory of memory” have become as irrelevant as psychological theories about umbrellas’ (Tulving, 2007: 42). From another disciplinary perspective, that of sociology, the field of memory studies was described as a ‘non-paradigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless’ enterprise (Olick and Robbin, 1998: 105) – a diagnosis that was to be repeated a decade later in the first issue of the newly founded journal Memory Studies (Olick, 2008: 25) despite the enormous amount of work done in the meantime.¹ Bracketing out all other ‘kinds’ to focus on cultural memory alone does not dramatically improve the situation. The notion of cultural memory implies that memories (whether individual or collective) are produced, reproduced and invested with meanings through cultural forms and practices. The question remains, however, of what these forms are, how production occurs, who its agents are, how meanings are negotiated, what kind of circulation exists between personal, collective and cultural memories – and how all these are to be studied.

In this context, the first of the ESF-COST project’s four international and interdisciplinary workshops set out to explore the borders and bridges between LCS and memory studies, and in particular the potential of LCS to contribute to a deeper understanding of cultural memory. The overlap of these two research fields becomes obvious when we remind ourselves that literature is a major institution of cultural memory, both as classics and as canon.² Less obvious but no less important is the conceptual and methodological relevance of LCS insofar as it asks a range of research questions beyond the philological or textimmanent level, enabling a way of looking at social and cultural issues through the lens of literary thinking, that is, regarding them as essentially readable. We believe that this way of looking – which we have chosen to refer to as cultural literacy – is part of the tendency towards interdisciplinarity in the humanities. In this way, LCS has a take on key notions of memory studies such as the ‘truth of memory’ (the interweaving of factuality and fictionality), the regimes of memory (texts, spaces, objects, bodies) or traumatic memory and its representations. The relevance of LCS is implied by the fact that remembering and forgetting are only made possible by the use of ‘cultural tools’ (Wertsch, 2002). Perhaps the most widely used of such cultural tools is the creation and dissemination of narratives. Conveying values as well as knowledge and experience, narrative memory practices employ a vast array of textual and quasi-textual resources to communicate the meaning of the past and summon communities to defend that meaning.³ Both conceptually and methodologically, LCS is uniquely well equipped to engage with the textual (artefactual) properties and the rhetorical repertoires of memory, as well as with the interpretation of narratives in their relation to truth, fiction and intentionality. It can help us to understand how texts construct and undermine identities, how trauma is processed into cultural memory through fiction, how language partakes of the development of discourses and counter-discourses, how uniqueness and multiplicity are mapped out in case studies and acknowledged in theoretical constructions. It can guard against all-too-easy assumptions of transparency and authenticity in what is remembered, encourage probing for alternative meanings and testing the limits of representation.⁴

Speaking of ‘cultural’ (or ‘social’, or ‘public’ or ‘collective’) memory necessarily calls for attention to the politics of memory. There is nothing inherently good in remembering or forgetting, which can be isolated from their concrete uses. In addition to providing the interpretative skills necessary for treating texts, objects, bodies and spaces as cultural documents, LCS can help us to move away from a wholesale celebration of memory and testimony to a critical consideration of regimes of memory. Such a consideration would rest on an awareness of the politics of memory as a public enterprise that can be hegemonic or counterhegemonic, depending on the social and political context. The project of memory studies has always been political, even when this has not been explicitly acknowledged. Leaving aside its earlier involvement in creating national imagery and identity, it is obvious that memory studies has a significant role to play in the fashioning of new European identities. LCS-informed memory studies can be particularly useful in dealing with situations where conflicting strategies of remembering and forgetting create boundaries and exclusions, that cause social and political friction – for example, in the area of ethnic or religious identification. Such situations are ever more frequent in Europe, but societies and institutions often lack an awareness of their historical roots and consequently an essential sense of cultural perspective. In general, the present situation of ever-growing trans- and interculturality, of reappropriation of the past by postcolonial and post-totalitarian subjects, of competing memory claims and identities, reveals the timeliness and urgency of wider academic and public debates on cultures of memory and the tools for crafting and sustaining them. Some of the urgent questions to discuss refer to the links between memory and community, memory and participation, memory and ethics. Who owns cultural memory and who decides what should be remembered and what forgotten? How are these decisions transmitted to the public? How do counter-memories emerge and how are they maintained and handed on? As the European tradition of coexisting nation states is slowly superseded by political constructions like the European Union, how do such constructions adapt or create what they see as ‘the’ European memory?

In seeking answers to some of these questions, the three essays in this section offer LCS-informed ‘readings’ of three very different cases. Isabel Capeloa Gil draws links between cultural memory and postcolonial studies. Portugal is perhaps the ideal test case, given its imperial past and its continued attachment to it as a fiction of the nation. Gil is interested in the ways earlier visual representations of the colonial past interact with newer ones which seek to undermine the linearity of the national identity narrative. She makes the case for a ‘visual literacy’ (an ability to read the visual fictions of an invented past) denouncing the suggestive transparency of the photographic image and allowing for an acknowledgement of the fictionality and rhetoricity of memory.

In the next essay, Sibel Irzık works in the opposite direction – rather than applying a close reading informed by literary studies to another kind of material, she works from the literary text to its cultural and political context. She explores two waves of Turkish coup d’état novels: one following the coup of 1971, the other following that of 1980. The question is how literature remembers or fails to remember political events in specific social circumstances. Irzık cautions against an exclusive focus on the notion of trauma and draws the attention to the socioeconomic context of the painful separation between literature and experience. She points to the disarticulation of the political in the present neoliberal culture and the liberation of literature from a tradition which used to regard it as a collective conscience – a freedom that entailed guilt, however.

Finally, Ricarda Vidal employs a third approach focusing on cultural memory as the basis for artistic practices and public engagement with the built environment. She is interested in the production of memory and nostalgia inherent in gentrification projects and the interaction of artists with the (re)built environment. Her focus is on Spitalfields Market in East London, which can be seen as a case of cultural memory in the making, implying decisions on what is to be remembered and what erased. She then goes on to discuss Janet Cardiff’s sound walk around the area as an example of artwork using a psychogeographic strategy to decipher (and to some extent reinvent) the stories told by architects and urban planners, and by former inhabitants who have left their traces on the buildings and the streets of the area.

With their variety of approach and subject, the three essays in this section do more than showcase the scope and potential of LCS, and more than demonstrate its relevance to memory studies. They signal that LCS has long since abandoned its ivory tower and taken an interest in what people and communities live with and worry about.

Notes

1. It is not possible to give an overview of the field here, even for the decade in question, but some influential recent English-language publications which map out its main thematic nodes and signal the tendencies of its development include Misztal (2003), Hodgkin and Radstone (2005), Radstone and Hodgkin (2005), Erll and Nünning (2008), Erll and Rigney (2009), Pakier and Strath (2010), and Radstone and Schwarz (2010).

2. See Aleida Assmann on memory as archive and canon. As she defines these terms, ‘archive’ is reference memory, that is, passive and cumulative, while ‘canon’ is working memory, that is, active and selective (Assmann, 2008). Note the adoption of a term from literary studies, which illustrates the conceptual relevance of LCS.

3. No wonder film theorist Annette Kuhn has introduced the concept of ‘memory text’ to explore performances of memory in visual culture (Kuhn, 2010).

4. For a major debate on the latter with contributions from historians and literary scholars, see Friedlander (1992). The scandal around the fake memoir as Holocaust survivor published by Binjamin Wilkomirski [Bruno Dössekker] raises similar issues in a practical – legal and moral – context (for the memoir and the investigation see Maechler, 2001). The debate on the representation of the Holocaust was stirred recently by Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes [The Kindly Ones] (Littell, 2006).

Works cited

Assmann, Aleida (2008) ‘Canon and archive’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds.) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Media and Cultural Memory VII) (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 97–107.

Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning (eds.) (2008) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Media and Cultural Memory VII) (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter).

Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney (eds.) (2009) Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter).

Friedlander, Saul (ed.) (1992) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press).

Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone (eds.) (2003) Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (New York and London: Routledge).

Kuhn, Annette (2010) ‘Memory texts and memory work: Performances of memory in and with visual media’, Memory Studies, 3 (4), 298–313.

Littell, Jonathan (2006) Les Bienveillantes (Paris: Gallimard).

Maechler, Stefan (2001) The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, John E. Woods (trans.), including the text of Fragments [orig., shorter version, without Wilkomirski text: Der Fall Wilkomirski: Über die Wahrheit einer Biografie, 2000] (New York: Schocken Books).

Misztal, Barbara A. (2003) Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press).

Nora, Pierre (2004) ‘L’avènement mondial de la mémoire’, Divinatio, 19, 11–22.

Olick, Jeffrey K. (2008) ‘ “Collective memory”: A memoir and prospect’, Memory Studies, 1 (1), 23–9.

Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins (1998) ‘Social memory studies: From “collective memory” to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105–40.

Pakier, Malgorzata and Bo Strath (eds.) (2010) A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York and Oxford: Berghahn).

Radstone, Susannah (2008) ‘Memory studies: For and against’, Memory Studies, 1 (1), 31–9.

Radstone, Susannah and Bill Schwarz (eds.) (2010) Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press).

Radstone, Susannah and Katharine Hodgkin (eds.) (2003) Regimes of Memory, Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative (New York and London: Routledge).

Tulving, Endel (2007) ‘Are there 256 different kinds of memory?’, in James S. Nairne (ed.) Foundations of Remembering. Essays in Honor of Henry L. Roediger, III (New York: Psychology Press), 39–52.

Wertsch, James (2002) Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press).

2

Visual Recall in the Present: Critical Nostalgia and the Memory of Empire in Portuguese Culture

Isabel Capeloa Gil

Often, to make peace is to forget, as Susan Sontag insightfully claims (Sontag, 2003: 115), but under what conditions and for whom? And how does the selective amnesia about a past perceived at once as grandiose and tyrannical, messianic and violent, contribute to repairing suppressed memories? In our memory-prone present, questions like these cannot aim at a comprehensive resolution and instead require a strategic accommodation. While for some the painful remembrance of the past is still deeply ingrained in bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Remembering and Forgetting
• Part II: Migration and Translation
• Part III: Electronic Textuality
• Part IV: Biosociality, Biopolitics and the Body
• Index