Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, Silvia Pellicer-Ortín, María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319617589
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319617596
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

This volume explores the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. By focusing on contemporary narratives in English from 1990 to the present, the essays in the collection delve into both the treatment of memory in literature and the view of literature as a medium of memory, paying special attention to major controversies attending the representation and (re)construction of individual, cultural and collective memories in the literary narratives published during the last few decades. By analysing texts written by authors of such diverse origins as Great Britain, South-Korea, the USA, Cuba, Australia, India, as well as Native-American Indian and African-American writers, the contributors to the collection analyse a good range of memory frictions —in connection with melancholic mourning, immigration, diaspora, genocide, perpetrator guilt, dialogic witnessing, memorialisation practices, inherited traumatic memories, sexual abuse, prostitution, etc.— through the recourse to various disciplines —such as psychoanalysis, ethics, (bio)politics, space theories, postcolonial studies, narratology, gender studies—, resulting in a book that is expected to make a ground-breaking contribution to a field whose possibilities have yet to be fully explored.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Memory Frictions—Conflict–Negotiation–Politics in Contemporary Literature in English
• Part I Experimentation and Genre: Formal Memory Frictions
• Chapter 2 The Powers of Vulnerability: The Restorative Uses of Elegy
• Chapter 3 Narrative Form, Memory Frictions and the Revelation of Traumatic Secrets in Toni Morrison’s Home
• Chapter 4 The Zigzag Trajectory Through Time of Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic
• Part II Collective Tensions and the Politics of Remembrance
• Chapter 5 Public Art and Communal Space: The Politics of Commemoration in Amy Waldman’s The Submission
• Chapter 6 A Korean “Apocryphal” Island, Once the Shore, by Paul Yoon
• Chapter 7 False Memories, False Foods: Eating, Cooking, Remembering in Tastes like Cuba by Eduardo Machado
• Part III The Haunting Presence of the Holocaust: Multidirectional, Transgenerational and Memorial Struggles
• Chapter 8 The Holocaust in the Eye of the Beholder: Memory in Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café
• Chapter 9 Lore, or the Implicated Witness: Rachel Seiffert’s Postmemory Work
• Chapter 10 “No Redress but Memory”: Holocaust Representation and Memorialization in E.L. Doctorow’s City of God
• Part IV Mapping Memories, Spatial F(r)ictions and Troubled Identities
• Chapter 11 Re-Mapping the Trauma Paradigm: The Politics of Native American Grief in Louise Erdrich’s “Shamengwa”
• Chapter 12 Remembering the Way Back Home: The Role of Place in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting (2010)
• Chapter 13 Negotiating Traumatic Memories in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House: White Man’s Law vs. Native Justice and Traditio
• Chapter 14 Conclusion
• Index