Liedeke Plate

Walking in Virginia Woolf's Footsteps, Performing Cultural Memory

The past two decades have seen the rise of the walking tour as a tourist practice that stands in uneasy and contradictory relation to commodity culture. Focusing on the guided tour to Virginia Woolf’s London, this article examines what happens when we literally go back to Bloomsbury, walking the literary text as we write the urban one. Placing it in a tradition of walking as a cultural, critical and aesthetic practice, this article explores the literary walk as a mapping of the city, a reading of the streets that is also a performance of the text and that, as an embodied experiencing of urban space, is the corollary of the present obsession with heritage and cultural memory.

Technologies of Memory in the Arts

Technologies of Memory in the Arts covers the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies of Memory and Trauma from an international spectrum. It focuses on art and artistic practices as technologies of memory: paintings, souvenirs, science fiction films, memorials, novels, documentaries, comic strips, and toys. Exploring the varied ways in which art produces and processes the past in global present, the book examines how art has a particular stake in the complex processes of cultural remembrance and amnesia.

Remembering the Future; or, Whatever Happened to Re‐Vision?

I n her essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne Rich famously wrote, “Re-Vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction— is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival” (Rich 1972, 18). Rich’s words are well known. They have been quoted many times throughout the past three and a half decades, usually to underscore the need for women to revisit the past and get to know it differently in order to change the future. Rich’s call for re-vision, in the sense of retelling the stories that make up our common cultural heritage from the perspective of postcolonialism, feminism, and gender and queer studies, has transformed not only our understanding of the past but also our understanding of how we come to such an understanding. Literary history, historiography, and history tout court will never be the same again. The bell has tolled for the grands récits, the grand narratives that served to bolster the legitimacy of the ruling social institutions (Lyotard 1984). According to the French historian Pierre Nora, this fragmentation of History into histories is one of the reasons for the current obsession with

Amnesiology: Towards the study of cultural oblivion

It is generally accepted that memory is a dialectic involving both remembering and forgetting. Also, there is agreement among cultural memory scholars that acts of memory seek to counter the effects of forgetting: they serve the imperative to remember and impede the work of forgetting. This article develops the concept of amnesiology to explore forgetting and forgetfulness not as a failure of memory but as a made condition, produced and reproduced. Focusing on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, a book which was carved out of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, it inquires into the relationship between memory performance and the production of oblivion and explores the role of language and literature in it. As I argue, the die-cut pages of Tree of Codes invite reflection on the narrative and technological dimensions of memory as well as on the role silence, repression and absence play in it as technologies of forgetting.

Unreading, Rereading, and the Art of Not Reading

In the early months of 2007, the highbrow Parisian publishing house Éditions de Minuit publishes Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on a pas lus? to great public interest. The book apparently answers a need: it is an immediate success and becomes one of the French bestsellers of the summer of 2007, with translations in all of the major European languages. If one overlooks the question mark at its end, as most translations appear to have done, the manual-like title suggests the book provides practical tips on how to bluff one’s way through reading. As such, it places the thin paperback lightly but squarely in the “How-to” category, at the opposite end of Matei Calinescu’s magisterial Rereading (1993), which is above all concerned with what happens after, and not before or instead of reading. Yet, how different are the two books really? Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, as the title of the English translation goes, and Calinescu’s Rereading, ostensibly differ significantly: they have different agendas, are written for different audiences, and command different readings. Yet their reflections on nonreading and re-reading also reveal structural similarities, showing re-reading and not-reading to be part of the same paradigm. In this essay in homage to Matei Calinescu, I propose to tease out some of the tensions between the art of non-reading and that of re-reading. I believe this exercise is entirely in the spirit of Calinescu’s probing inquiry into the plights and pleasures of literary reading and that, as such, it forms an appropriate tribute to his contribution to Western intellectual history and to the field of comparative literature.

Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction

‘Remember me,’ the ghost famously says to Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy, and like so many contemporary Hamlets, we obey the spectral past’s call to remembrance. The seemingly simple imperative to remember, however, obscures the fact that remembering can be a tricky business. Sometimes we remember in order to honour the past, even as we remember selectively and distort the past. At other times, we disremember, failing to remember what seems of little importance, or forgetting altogether. We may remember because we refuse to forget. Or we may forget what we wish to remember. By remembering, we form an idea of our self and shape a sense of our identity; thus, we end up embodying the memory that inhabits us. Yet, memory is a dynamic phenomenon for any individual, but also for a culture as a whole. Memory is affected by politics, ideology, technology, or art and popular culture. By changing over time, memory may unsettle received ideas of the past, and consequently also of the present and even the future.

Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC of ‘Stolentelling’ (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright)

‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’, T.S. Eliot said in a renowned aphorism (1928 [1920]: 125). Eliot’s distinction between imitation and theft identifies rewriting as a highly ambiguous practice that stands at the heart of the art and craft of writing: it is at once what writers do and should not do, or should not be seen to be doing, or do not want to acknowledge as having done. Pointing to a complex relationship between rewriting and plagiarism, Eliot’s aphorism suggests the distinction may be less obvious and tenable than its pithiness implies, troubling the opposition between good and bad, mature and immature.

Untold Stories: ‘Writing Back’ to Silence

‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak crucially asked (1988), answering that since the subaltern woman cannot speak within existing discourses, the conditions that would allow her to do so need to be created. The silence of the subaltern poses important questions for the feminist project of rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory. Can rewriting be a means of knowing ‘the silent, silenced centre’, and does it constitute a journey into representation as remembered self, or is rewriting rather what Pierre Macherey termed ‘a sort of journey to silence’? Insisting it is not enough to speak to be heard, Spivak’s analysis of the subaltern’s silence as discursively produced both reminds us of the importance of the context of reception, as discussed in the previous chapter, and invites us to see rewriting as the locus of a complex and ambiguous relationship of language to cultural memory and power.

Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories: Contemporary Women’s Rewriting and/as Cultural Memory

Rewriting — the act of writing again, literally re-membering the old stories — is an act of memory. It is an act of re-collection in which the past is re-called and made sense of in the light of the present. As each age rewrites the past in its own image, rewriting is the process and product of cultural remembrance and can thus be viewed as emblematic, representative, and characteristic of cultural memory conceived as a ‘realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences’ (Assmann 2008: 110). Rewriting is marked by a dynamics of storing and retrieving, inscribing and obliterating, remembering and forgetting, that is productive of memory as shared and formative of collective, cultural identity.

En/gendering Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting, and the Politics of Recognition

In the 1970s, rewriting emerges as a privileged mode of feminist textual production. Feminist activist writers such as Adrienne Rich in the United States and Helene Cixous in France develop concepts for it and feminist writers and writers’ collectives explore the possibilities rewriting affords them to convey their understanding of existence. The resulting stories, Sara Maitland explains apropos of her ‘Penelope’, speak of ‘experience at large. Not only as it is but as it might be’ (1978: 114). Rewriting from the woman’s perspective inscribes this possibility of change within cultural memory: ‘Our whole history and the structures of consolation (myths) that we have built for ourselves need to be and can be transformed’ (114).