From UPenn CFP
Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature and Others
full name / name of organization:
452ºF Journal of Comparative Literature
contact email:
redaccion@452f.com
On July 31st 2010, we start the CFP for the fourth issue of 452ºF Journal
of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature.This CFP is open and
addressed to anyone that wishes to and that holds at least a BA degree.
The bidding terms, which are exposed below and that regulate the reception
and publication of the different articles are subject to the content of
the Peer review System, the Style-sheet and the Legal Notice. These can be
consulted in the Procedures area of the web page.
- The deadline is on September 30th 2010, all articles received after this
date will be rejected.
- The number of articles corresponding to this fourth issue will be
between 12 and 16. 40% of these will be reserved to researchers without
PhDs, and the Editorial board can only represent 20% of the total.
- The articles will be placed, according to their field of interest, in
the corresponding section of the journal (monographic or miscellaneous).
- The monographic part will be restricted to 6 to 8 articles and, in this
fourth issue, will approach the relations between Memory and Collective
Identity in Comparative Literature, with the following possible research
approaches:
a. –Relations between cultural production, memory discourses and the
construction of collective identities.
b. –Studies on testimonial literature. Relations between individual and
collective memory.
c. –The fluctuant nature of identity: transformation of the perspective of
memory according to the social-historical context.
d. –Relations between narrative strategies and the ideological load of
memory.
e. –Analysis of the politic capitalization of cultural productions around
memory.
The journal commits itself to organize a thematic bibliography of the
available studies on the topic, following the perspective proposed in the
Monographic section of the web page.
- All other articles will constitute the miscellaneous section and, placed
within the margins of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, the
choice of the theme and approach is free.
- The articles must be sent to redaccion@452f.com . The “subject” of the
email should state what section the article belongs to (“monographic” or
“miscellaneous”), the name of the author and the title of the article.
Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature
Memory has lately become a central concern in contemporary culture and
politics of all societies in a global scale. This “memory boom”,
originated in socio-historical, political, cultural, technological and
market-oriented reasons, is articulated around a certain “memory
industry”, which in turn generates identity discourses. Cultural products
play a fundamental role in the formation and consolidation of these
discourses.
On the one hand, the rehabilitation of the memory of wars, dictatorships,
killings and genocides tries to rescue from oblivion a traumatic past.
There is also a willingness of discursive democratization (represented by
the promotion of testimonial literature), looking to break through that
version of history written by the winning side. Also, the need to look
towards the past as a means of understanding the present is often
emphasized, to increase the new generations’ awareness of the need to
avoid the repetition of the same atrocities. Therefore, new
historiographic methodologies have vindicated the incorporation of new and
different perspectives that had traditionally been excluded from the
construction of discourses.
Nevertheless, the notion of discursive elaboration of memories, together
with the fact that discourses about the past are always filtered by the
interests and beliefs of the present, make it necessary for this new
historiography to be constantly under scrutiny by a critical analysis.
This would reveal possible “abuses of memory” (term coined by Todorov in
the text with the same title) denounced by many authors, politicians,
journalists and human rights activists. It is particularly interesting as
well as complex to work on the relationship that can be established
between the constant re-writing of the past and the construction of
collective identities. As Halbwachs explains, collective memory puts
together the past and the present, as well as the individual and the
social group. It is in this sense that we are also interested in the
different discursive strategies that several authors have developed to
reconstruct their memories from a subjective vision of the present. This
also allows us to establish a link between certain forms of narration and
the different underlying ideological intentions. One of the
characteristics that make memory studies difficult is the specificity of
each political vindication, and also their fluctuating character in
relation to present-day socio-political factors. However, at the same
time, in a global world of linked identities and politics, “different
discourses on historical memory are intertwined and overlap each other all
throughout the world, trespassing frontiers and bouncing against each
other, sometimes hiding and forgetting their own historical memory,
sometimes reinforcing it", as claimed by Huyssen in an interview for
Metropolis magazine.
Taking as starting point, then, the fact that the restoration of the past
is subject to the ideologies of the present; and also that memory studies
are not only a tool for analysis, but also for the transformation of
contemporary contexts, we want to vindicate a critical role that can
distinguish between the "obligation of memory” (which introduces an
ethical evaluation of its own look towards the past, as pointed out by
Lozano Aguilar inDecir, contar, pensar la guerra), and the possible
political abuses that derivate from these vindications. We also believe
that a fundamental role of criticism is to suggest, as long as it is
possible, new strategies to go beyond militaristic discourses. We propose
therefore the following lines of research for this monographic issue:
a. –Relations between cultural production, memory discourses and the
construction of collective identities.
b. –Studies on testimonial literature. Relations between individual and
collective memory.
c. –The fluctuant nature of identity: transformation of the perspective of
memory according to the social-historical context.
d. –Relations between narrative strategies and the ideology of memories.
e. –Analysis of the political capitalization of cultural productions on
memory.
f. –Strategies to overcome memory discourses.
g. –Memory discourses as trans-border political discourses. Analysis,
through cultural products, of the influence of different discourses on
different geographical areas.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
New Book of Short Stories - "Memory Wall"
Books made of linked stories, like recent award-winning favorites Olive Kitteridge and Let the Great World Spin, are usually connected by shared places and people. The tender and lyrical stories in Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall are linked no less strongly, but, as if Oliver Sacks had turned to fiction, by a neurological theme. Set as far apart as South Africa and the Korean DMZ, Doerr's stories circle around the central pull of memory, both the struggle against memory's loss and the weight of memories that remain. In the long and brilliantly intricate title story, as memories fade from an aging white woman in suburban Cape Town, they are stored for her (and for anyone else with compatible ports installed in their head) in replayable cartridges. In the final story, "Afterworld," girls from a Jewish orphanage who were murdered by Nazis survive decades later as ghosts in the visionary epileptic seizures of the one girl who survived them. If memories in these tales are like the Yangtze River town in "Village 113," threatened with the forced forgetfulness of a man-made flood, they are also like the legendary sturgeon in "The River Nemunas," which surfaces with an ancient, armor-covered dignity years after it was thought to have vanished. --Tom NissleyRead review here
Read article here in Books of the Times
Read book excerpt here
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The Disappeared - Novel on the Cambodian Genocide
From: The New York Times
January 10, 2010
Love in the Time of Genocide
By DALIA SOFER
THE DISAPPEARED
By Kim Echlin
235 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14
Kim Echlin’s novel “The Disappeared” contains many elements that might doom a lesser book: the deaths of multiple characters (among them the narrator’s baby); an unabashedly effusive love story; a mix of first- and second-person narration; and, as a setting, the bones and ashes of the Cambodian genocide, which claimed approximately 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979. Yet the book manages to be spellbinding.
When the narrator, Anne Greves, first meets Serey, the Cambodian man who will remain the object of her desire and unflinching love for decades to come, she is a 16-year-old high school student in Montreal who frequents smoky blues clubs in the company of older girls. Serey, a math student five years her senior and the long-haired, exotic lead singer of a band called No Exit, catches her attention. The two talk, then kiss, and the rest, as they say, is history — though in this case it is truly history: a love story spanning decades and geographies, involving some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Absence is an initial magnet between the two. For Serey, who is in exile in Canada because the borders of Cambodia have closed, the absence is that of his family, from whom he has had no word for four years. Hanging on to their photograph and to the final, yellowed telegram from his father, Serey carries “a survivor’s pinprick of despair” in his eyes. That his band is called No Exit is no coincidence — Sartre’s play of that name, of course, supplied us with the saying “Hell is other people.” For Anne, the absence is that of her mother, who was crushed by a truck on an icy road when Anne was 2, and also the emotional absence of her kind but inattentive father, an engineer and maker of medical prosthetics, with a penchant for calm and order. “He believed that if he worked hard enough I could be shaped like a mechanical limb,” Anne says. But this turbulent teenager is anything but mechanical, and the sexual desire and eventual love she feels for Serey is raw and unfettered. “I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law,” she says. “Everything was animal sensation and music.”
The Cambodian border eventually opens and Serey leaves Montreal — and Anne — to find his family. Eleven years later, believing she has spotted him on television at a political rally, Anne buys a ticket to Phnom Penh and sets out to find him. And she does.
There is something of Marguerite Duras in these pages, something of the lust between the young Western girl and the Asian man that drove novels like “The Lover” and “The North China Lover.” But while Duras focuses mostly on desire, Echlin focuses on absolute love — physical desire coupled with the need to know everything about the beloved, to follow him even to the grave and beyond. For Anne, knowing Serey means trying to understand Cambodia, with all its dire secrets. As Serey says to Anne’s father during a brief, uncongenial meeting, “My country is my skin.”
Echlin captures the beauty and horror of Cambodia in equal measure. “The smell of the River Bassac,” Anne says, describing her first day in Phnom Penh, “meltwaters from distant mountains tangled into humid air and garlic and night jasmine and cooking oil and male sweat and female wetness. Corruption loves the darkness.” Of the killing fields, she writes: “Depressions in the earth overgrown with grass. Stupas of skulls and bones. The sky.” And later: “We watched two small boys catching frogs in the gullies of the fields, running past paddy and sugar palm and cloth and bone. The grass had done its work.” Most memorable is the lingering stench of death: “People startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline,” Echlin writes, “surrogate odors of torture and dead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump.”
It is fitting, then, that when Anne presses Serey to reveal his nightmares, or to say what he has been doing in Phnom Penh, he deflects her with a compliment: “You smell so good.” Despite their love, these two are still foreign to each other. Borders persist. Boundaries can be stretched only so far. Anne, not of Cambodia, does not carry its smell. She is both savior and outsider, at once revered and reproached. The same can be said of the foreign aid workers, who speak of democracy but are impotent to change anything. “Foreigners come and bark but everything just keeps going the same way,” Serey says.
Worse still are the backpackers, who “drifted through Phnom Penh, explored sex and skulls and temples, talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s.” Much has been said of the banality of evil. Here we are made to think of the banality of indifference.
But if Echlin makes note of the indifferent, her novel is anything but. Love and death pulsate through its pages, interlaced. When Anne speaks of her first kiss with Serey, she writes, “I remember . . . the touch of your hand against my skull.” Not her head — her skull. In Anne Greves’s world, everything is felt to the bone, even love. Her most tender memory of her father involves the study of anatomy, “his strong fingers tracing the lines of muscles and bones on my small foot.” In Phnom Penh, the traced bones become all too real: she meets a man whose job is to count the dead, opening mass graves to “release the bones.” And she befriends a woman called Grandmother Fertilizer, who during the Pol Pot era made fertilizer from human ashes.
It is amid such decay that Anne and Serey conceive their baby girl, who arrives into the world stillborn (this information is revealed early on) — another addition to the list of the disappeared: mothers, fathers, former leaders, all vanish into the “line between life and death.” Later, addressing Serey, Anne says, “I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.”
This novel is her memorial to him, and to the “nameless missing.” The second-person narrative is apt here, as it is a very specific “you” — the “you” of song lyrics. In Montreal, Serey sang to Anne of love and longing. This novel is Anne’s song to him.
Briefly, near the book’s middle, Echlin loses this specific “you” and slips into the generic instead, directly asking the reader to imagine the horrors of Cambodia. This device is distracting, turning a mesmerizing ballad into a history lesson. On a few other occasions the prose loses some of its control, the list of atrocities sounding like a United Nations manifesto.
But these faults detract little from this exquisite novel. Early on, when a young Anne complains to her father about having no mother, he tells her, “Think of yourself as a solitaire, . . . the philosopher’s stone.” And like the philosopher’s stone, she creates alchemy. She permits what has been unsaid to be said, and what has been nameless to be named at last.
Dalia Sofer is the author of the novel “The Septembers of Shiraz.”
January 10, 2010
Love in the Time of Genocide
By DALIA SOFER
THE DISAPPEARED
By Kim Echlin
235 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14
Kim Echlin’s novel “The Disappeared” contains many elements that might doom a lesser book: the deaths of multiple characters (among them the narrator’s baby); an unabashedly effusive love story; a mix of first- and second-person narration; and, as a setting, the bones and ashes of the Cambodian genocide, which claimed approximately 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979. Yet the book manages to be spellbinding.
When the narrator, Anne Greves, first meets Serey, the Cambodian man who will remain the object of her desire and unflinching love for decades to come, she is a 16-year-old high school student in Montreal who frequents smoky blues clubs in the company of older girls. Serey, a math student five years her senior and the long-haired, exotic lead singer of a band called No Exit, catches her attention. The two talk, then kiss, and the rest, as they say, is history — though in this case it is truly history: a love story spanning decades and geographies, involving some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Absence is an initial magnet between the two. For Serey, who is in exile in Canada because the borders of Cambodia have closed, the absence is that of his family, from whom he has had no word for four years. Hanging on to their photograph and to the final, yellowed telegram from his father, Serey carries “a survivor’s pinprick of despair” in his eyes. That his band is called No Exit is no coincidence — Sartre’s play of that name, of course, supplied us with the saying “Hell is other people.” For Anne, the absence is that of her mother, who was crushed by a truck on an icy road when Anne was 2, and also the emotional absence of her kind but inattentive father, an engineer and maker of medical prosthetics, with a penchant for calm and order. “He believed that if he worked hard enough I could be shaped like a mechanical limb,” Anne says. But this turbulent teenager is anything but mechanical, and the sexual desire and eventual love she feels for Serey is raw and unfettered. “I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law,” she says. “Everything was animal sensation and music.”
The Cambodian border eventually opens and Serey leaves Montreal — and Anne — to find his family. Eleven years later, believing she has spotted him on television at a political rally, Anne buys a ticket to Phnom Penh and sets out to find him. And she does.
There is something of Marguerite Duras in these pages, something of the lust between the young Western girl and the Asian man that drove novels like “The Lover” and “The North China Lover.” But while Duras focuses mostly on desire, Echlin focuses on absolute love — physical desire coupled with the need to know everything about the beloved, to follow him even to the grave and beyond. For Anne, knowing Serey means trying to understand Cambodia, with all its dire secrets. As Serey says to Anne’s father during a brief, uncongenial meeting, “My country is my skin.”
Echlin captures the beauty and horror of Cambodia in equal measure. “The smell of the River Bassac,” Anne says, describing her first day in Phnom Penh, “meltwaters from distant mountains tangled into humid air and garlic and night jasmine and cooking oil and male sweat and female wetness. Corruption loves the darkness.” Of the killing fields, she writes: “Depressions in the earth overgrown with grass. Stupas of skulls and bones. The sky.” And later: “We watched two small boys catching frogs in the gullies of the fields, running past paddy and sugar palm and cloth and bone. The grass had done its work.” Most memorable is the lingering stench of death: “People startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline,” Echlin writes, “surrogate odors of torture and dead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump.”
It is fitting, then, that when Anne presses Serey to reveal his nightmares, or to say what he has been doing in Phnom Penh, he deflects her with a compliment: “You smell so good.” Despite their love, these two are still foreign to each other. Borders persist. Boundaries can be stretched only so far. Anne, not of Cambodia, does not carry its smell. She is both savior and outsider, at once revered and reproached. The same can be said of the foreign aid workers, who speak of democracy but are impotent to change anything. “Foreigners come and bark but everything just keeps going the same way,” Serey says.
Worse still are the backpackers, who “drifted through Phnom Penh, explored sex and skulls and temples, talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s.” Much has been said of the banality of evil. Here we are made to think of the banality of indifference.
But if Echlin makes note of the indifferent, her novel is anything but. Love and death pulsate through its pages, interlaced. When Anne speaks of her first kiss with Serey, she writes, “I remember . . . the touch of your hand against my skull.” Not her head — her skull. In Anne Greves’s world, everything is felt to the bone, even love. Her most tender memory of her father involves the study of anatomy, “his strong fingers tracing the lines of muscles and bones on my small foot.” In Phnom Penh, the traced bones become all too real: she meets a man whose job is to count the dead, opening mass graves to “release the bones.” And she befriends a woman called Grandmother Fertilizer, who during the Pol Pot era made fertilizer from human ashes.
It is amid such decay that Anne and Serey conceive their baby girl, who arrives into the world stillborn (this information is revealed early on) — another addition to the list of the disappeared: mothers, fathers, former leaders, all vanish into the “line between life and death.” Later, addressing Serey, Anne says, “I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.”
This novel is her memorial to him, and to the “nameless missing.” The second-person narrative is apt here, as it is a very specific “you” — the “you” of song lyrics. In Montreal, Serey sang to Anne of love and longing. This novel is Anne’s song to him.
Briefly, near the book’s middle, Echlin loses this specific “you” and slips into the generic instead, directly asking the reader to imagine the horrors of Cambodia. This device is distracting, turning a mesmerizing ballad into a history lesson. On a few other occasions the prose loses some of its control, the list of atrocities sounding like a United Nations manifesto.
But these faults detract little from this exquisite novel. Early on, when a young Anne complains to her father about having no mother, he tells her, “Think of yourself as a solitaire, . . . the philosopher’s stone.” And like the philosopher’s stone, she creates alchemy. She permits what has been unsaid to be said, and what has been nameless to be named at last.
Dalia Sofer is the author of the novel “The Septembers of Shiraz.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
LinkWithin
