This is a collection of essays on the status of
memory -- individual and collective, cultural and
transcultural -- in contemporary literature, film, and
other visual media. Contributors look at memorys
representation, adaptation, translation, and
appropriation, as well as its mediation and remediation.
Memorys irreducibly constructed nature is explored, even
as its status is reaffirmed as the basis of both
individual and collective identity. The book begins with
an overview of the field, with an emphasis on the
question of subjectivity. Under the section title Memory
Studies: Theories, Changes, and Challenges, these
chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the volume.
Section 2, Literature and the Power of Cultural
Memory/Memorializing, focuses on the relation between
literature and cultural memory. Section 3, Recuperating
Lives: Memory and Life Writing, shifts the focus from
literature to autobiography and life writing, especially
those lives shaped by trauma and forgotten by history.
Section 4, Cinematic Remediations: Memory and History,
examines specific films in an effort to account for
cinemas intimate and mutually constitutive relationship
with memory and history. The final section, Multi-Media
Interventions: Television, Video, and Collective Memory,
considers individual and collective memory in the
context of contemporary visual texts, at the crossroads
of popular and avant-garde cultures.
|
|