Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature

Description

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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xv Introduction: Memory Frictions—Conflict–Negotiation–Politics in Contemporary Literature in English (María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, Silvia Pellicer-Ortín)....Pages 1-17 Front Matter ....Pages 19-19 The Powers of Vulnerability: The Restorative Uses of Elegy (Jean-Michel Ganteau)....Pages 21-40 Narrative Form, Memory Frictions and the Revelation of Traumatic Secrets in Toni Morrison’s Home (Susana Onega)....Pages 41-63 The Zigzag Trajectory Through Time of Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (Sandra Singer)....Pages 65-84 Front Matter ....Pages 85-85 Public Art and Communal Space: The Politics of Commemoration in Amy Waldman’s The Submission (Paula Martín-Salván)....Pages 87-104 A Korean “Apocryphal” Island, Once the Shore, by Paul Yoon (Marc Amfreville)....Pages 105-119 False Memories, False Foods: Eating, Cooking, Remembering in Tastes like Cuba by Eduardo Machado (Nieves Pascual Soler)....Pages 121-139 Front Matter ....Pages 141-141 The Holocaust in the Eye of the Beholder: Memory in Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café (Bárbara Arizti)....Pages 143-163 Lore, or the Implicated Witness: Rachel Seiffert’s Postmemory Work (Susanne Baackmann)....Pages 165-186 “No Redress but Memory”: Holocaust Representation and Memorialization in E.L. Doctorow’s City of God (María Ferrández San Miguel)....Pages 187-205 Front Matter ....Pages 207-207 Re-Mapping the Trauma Paradigm: The Politics of Native American Grief in Louise Erdrich’s “Shamengwa” (Silvia Martínez-Falquina)....Pages 209-230 Remembering the Way Back Home: The Role of Place in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting (2010) (Dolores Herrero)....Pages 231-253 Negotiating Traumatic Memories in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House: White Man’s Law vs. Native Justice and Tradition (Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz)....Pages 255-276 Conclusion (Robert Eaglestone)....Pages 277-282 Back Matter ....Pages 283-294