Memory has always been crucial to French literature and culture as a means of mediating the relationship between perception and knowledge of the individual coming to terms with his identity in time. Relatively recently, memory has also emerged as the key force in the creation of a collective consciousness in the wider perspective of French cultural history. This collection of essays, selected from the proceedings of a seminar on Memory given by Dr Emma Wilson at the University of Cambridge, offers a fresh evaluation of memory as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon in modern and contemporary French culture, including literature, cinema and the visual arts. Anamnesia, the books title, develops the Aristotelian concept of anamnesis: recollection as a dynamic and creative process, which includes forgetting as much as remembering, concealment as much as imagination. Memory in this extremely diverse range of essays is therefore far from being presented as a straightforward process of recalling the past, but emerges as the site of research and renegotiation, of contradictions and even aporia.
Contents: Emma Wilson: Preface Peter Collier/Anna Magdalena
Elsner/Olga Smith: Introduction Max Silverman: Trips, Tropes and Traces:
Reflections on Memory in French and Francophone Culture Ian James: Death,
Memory, Subjectivity: Perecs W, ou le souvenir denfance Anna Magdalena
Elsner: Lobscénité absolue du projet de comprendre: The Communicability of
Traumatic Knowledge in Claude Lanzmanns Shoah Myriem El Maïzi: Marguerite
Duras Poetics of Diversion: Memory, Forgetting and Invention Jenny Murray:
La mort inachevée: Writing, Remembering, and Forgetting in Assia Djebars
Le Blanc de lAlgérie, La Disparition de la langue française and Nulle part
dans la maison de mon père Patrick ODonovan: Memory as Object: A Relation
of Proximity? Catherine Crimp: Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett: Space
and the Materials of Memory Olga Smith: A Hollow Image of the Person:
Objects of Memory in the Art of Christian Boltanski Ferzina Banaji:
Rethinking Memory: The Violation of a lieu de mémoire in Marcel Ophüls Le
Chagrin et la pitié Jennifer Burris: A Landscape of Amnesia: The Loss and
Attempted Reconstruction of Memory in Artistic Representations of the Urban
Rositza Alexandrova: Things of Art: A Photographic Thumbing of the Nose
Katja Haustein: La vie comme uvre: Barthes with Proust Michèle Lester:
Through the Looking Glass: Becketts Monologues, Jacques Lacan and the Role
of Memory Roger Cardinal: Joë Bousquet: Remembering a Wound Thanh-Vân
Ton-That: Anna Moïs Riz Noir: A Feminine View of War, between Two Cultures
Amaleena Damlé: Phantasmal Relics: Psychoanalytical and Deconstructive Ghosts
in Moi LInterdite and Pagli by Ananda Devi Jenny Chamarette: Memory,
Representation of Time and Cinema Nadine Boljkovac: Intimacy and Prophecy:
Marker and Resnaiss Memories Richard Armstrong: «Nevers» is just a word
like any other: The Failure of Words and the Wandering Woman in Hiroshima
mon amour Isabelle McNeill: Agnès Vardas Moving Museums Carol Mavor: A
is for Alice, for Amnesia, for Anamnesis: A Fairy Tale called La Jetée.
The Editors: Peter Collier is Emeritus Fellow in French at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. His books include Proust and Venice (1989). He has translated Zolas Germinal (1994) and Prousts The Fugitive (2002). He is the series editor of Modern French Identities and European Connections for Peter Lang. Anna Magdalena Elsner is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge and currently a visiting researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She is writing on the relation between mourning and creativity in Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu. Apart from everything Proustian, she is also interested in French documentary cinema. Olga Smith is preparing her Ph.D. thesis, entitled The Erosion of the Real: Photography in France 1970s-2000s at the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.
