Amnesia and the Nation

Description

This book examines the relationships between memory, history, and national identity through an interdisciplinary analysis of James Joyce’s works—as well as of literary texts by Kundera, Ford, Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Luria, Anderson, and Yerushalmi, this study explores the burden of the past and the “nightmare of history” in Ireland and in the American South—from the Battle of the Boyne to the Good Friday Agreement, from the Civil War to the 2015 Mother Emanuel killings. Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii Introduction: Memory, Forgetting, and the Imagination (Vincent J. Cheng)....Pages 1-12 The Nightmare of History and the Burden of the Past (Vincent J. Cheng)....Pages 13-42 The Will to Forget: Nation and Forgetting in Ulysses (Vincent J. Cheng)....Pages 43-66 The Memory of the Past: National Memory and Commemoration (Vincent J. Cheng)....Pages 67-92 Joyce, Ireland, and the American South: Whiteness, Blackness, and Lost Causes (Vincent J. Cheng)....Pages 93-117 Slavery, the South, and Ethical Remembrancing (Vincent J. Cheng)....Pages 119-147 Afterword (Vincent J. Cheng)....Pages 149-150 Back Matter ....Pages 151-162