Memory and Identity in Modern and Postmodern American Literature

Description

This book discusses how American literary modernism and postmodernism interconnect memory and identity and if, and how, the intertwining of memory and identity has been related to the dominant socio-cultural trends in the United States or the specific historical contexts in the world. The book’s opening chapter is the interrogation of the narrator’s memories of Jay Gatsby and his life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The second chapter shows how in William Faulkner’s Light in August memory impacts the search for identities in the storylines of the characters. The third chapter discusses the correlation between memory, self, and culture in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Discussing Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party, the fourth chapter reveals that memory and identity are contextualized and that cognitive processes, including memory, are grounded in the body’s interaction with the environment, featuring dehumanized characters, whose identities appear as role-plays. The subsequent chapter is the analysis of how Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated deals with the heritage of Holocaust memories and postmemories. The last chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, the reconstructive nature of memory, and the politics and production of identity in Southeastern Europe.  Acknowledgements Contents 1 Introduction References 2 The Great Gatsby: A Memory of the Memory References 3 Light in August: Memory and Identity References 4 A Streetcar Named Desire: Memory, Self, and Culture References 5 Gerald’s Party: Embodied Memories and Fluid Identities 5.1 Episodic and Embodied Memories 5.2 Fluid, Role-Play Identities and Zombielike, Dehumanized, and Indiscernible Characters References 6 Everything is Illuminated: Unproductive Memories, Memorization Through Fictional Yizker and Dialogic Exchange, and Postmemory 6.1 Unproductive Memories and Inertness 6.2 The Reverberation of Memory via Fictional Yizker and Dialogic Exchange Toward ‘Collective Creation’ 6.3 Postmemory: Intergenerational and Transgenerational Transfer of Trauma References 7 Against the Day: A Mis/Re-membered and Re/Imagined Pilgrimage and Hybrid Identities 7.1 “A Memory of a Memory” (AtD 84) Against the Backdrop of Conflicting Historiography and Multiple Identities 7.2 The Fluidity and Locomotion of Water: An Analogy for Meandering Borders, Cultural Creolization, and Crisscrossed Identities 7.3 Subjugation, Trauma, Disappearance, and Disinterment: “The Same History of Exile and Migration” (AtD 928); “Four Hundred Years, We Have Been Exiles in Our Own Land” (AtD 819) 7.4 Stereotypes and the Spectacle of Terror: God Preserve You from the Hands of the Uskoks of Senj, “Already Half Folkloric” (AtD 870) References Index