- 291 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Memory and Latency in Contemporary Anglophone Literature
About this book
Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels that this book analyses withdraw from overt memory discourses and create new ways of re-membering that refigure the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is 'memorable' in the first place. Combining the analysis of the novels' overall structure with close readings of selected passages, this book links latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level, activating readers to challenge their learned ways of reading for memory.
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Information
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- 1 Introduction: Latency as a Mode of Memory
- 2 Memory – Latency – Eventfulness
- 3 Being Notably Absent: Uneventfulness and Digression in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013)
- 4 Idiorrhythm in Teju Cole’s Open City (2011)
- 5 Non-Evental Multiperspectivity: Column McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009)
- 6 “Places are Ghosts, too”: Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2014)
- 7 Re-Membering Modernism: Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018)
- 8 Remembering Britain’s Lost Children: The Myth of Filiation in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child (2015)
- 9 Conclusion
- Index