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7 Memory In his fascinating and valuable study of manuscript transmission in the forty years or so either side of 1600, H. R. Woudhuysen issues a warning against trusting some manuscript texts too far. ‘There is always the possibility’, he writes that some poems in miscellanies may not have been copied from written or from printed texts, but were reconstructed from memory. It is reasonable to suggest that the degree of textual corruption sometimes encountered in miscellany texts arises not simply from a failure in ability to copy words from one piece of paper
what he rejects in others. Indeed, if his ideas echo the sentiments that underwrote memories of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages, they also share some qualities with the ones he reviles. One of the things that motivated Tacitus, and something of particular interest to Himmler and other Nazis, was a sense that Rome had become weak and debased. By imaginatively confederating a diverse group of tribes into the Germanic people, Tacitus could set them off as constitutionally different from the citizens of Rome. In effect, he imagined Germanic ethnicity and so allowed
This chapter strikes out on a pathway of charting how Freud considered memory, as one of the processes working through the subject, and I will do so through a specific ‘case-history’. Although Freud thought psychoanalysis was in the pursuit of truth, the speculative nature of his writing, and the different, irreconcilable models of thought, set side by side alongside each
The previous chapter explored the different ways in which death manifested itself in the mid to late eighteenth century. This was a period that was characterised by new ways of writing about death in which the role of memory was implicit. Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ (1751) was instructive in that regard as his narrator imaginatively
shock-waves rippling through the Empire, an event that has understandably been erased from the easy memory of the British and subsequent Afrikaner rulers of South Africa. II Charles Fripp, The Battle of Isandhlwana (1885
For the Irish emigrant, the home place is elsewhere; it is ‘imagined’ in terms of both the past and the future – the past as a form of cultural memory and the future as a desire to return to the homeland. – from The Irish Dancing by
2 ‘A warmer memory’: speaking of Ireland 1 COLIN GRAHAM The colonized considers those venerable scholars relics and thinks of them as sleepwalkers who are living in an old dream. (Memmi 1990 [1957]: 172) [He] says that in the course of his labours it would happen that inspiration failed him: he then would go downstairs and out of his house, and enter a public urinal whose odor was suffocating. He breathed deeply, and having thus ‘approached as close as he could to the object of his horror’, he returned to his work. I cannot help recalling the author
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature explores intertextual memories of William Shakespeare in modern Irish writing. It proposes a new way of reading these memories through ‘dismemory’. Dismemory describes disruptive memories that are future oriented, demonstrating how Irish writers make use of Shakespeare to underwrite the Irish nation-state. The ghosts section foregrounds the father–son relation in Irish literature that is modelled on the ‘hauntological’ (Derrida, 1993) relation between Hamlet’s Ghost and his son. This relation is paradigmatic for Irish writers, evident through J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907), ‘Hades’ from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and John Banville’s Ghosts (1993). These examinations demonstrate how each adapts the father–son structure from Hamlet. The section on bodies thinks through Beckett’s Three Novels (1951–53) and Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1960–86) and how they foreground the material body. These bodies are tied either to the antitheatrical discourse (Beckett) or to maternity discourses (O’Brien), and in both cases, the Irish writers manage to throw off the bodies’ burdens much as their early modern literary forebears did. Finally, the land section examines W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney – first Yeats’s concern with the surface of the land results in an ideal image of the dancer, as in As You Like It and Edmund Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again; then, Heaney’s interest in the land’s depths. Heaney restores these unearthed Irish memories in his poetry, thereby creating a new Irish archive.
5 Post-apartheid repertoires of memory Artists . . . are not agents of power, but campaigners for invisible values no human being can live without. (Brink, 1996: 58) I turn now from these performances of memory by state or cultural institutions to look at embodied repertoires in the public sphere and in theatres. While the TRC clearly attempted to hear hidden stories and renegotiate the perceptions and values of South Africans, its effect was limited because a state of mind, values, and peoples’ views cannot be easily changed. Thus the extent to which the
This book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figure in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy, and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom. Subject to the continual refashioning of memory, the region became at once an image of Britain’s noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, rendering trips there rides on a time machine. The book’s approach to the Anglo-Scandinavian past addresses the specific impact of Nordic materials in framing conceptions of the English Middle Ages and positions the literature of medievalism less as the cause of modern Anglo-Nordic interests than as the recurrence of the same cultural concerns that animated early modern politics, science, and natural history. Emphasising multilingual non-literary traditions (such as travel writing and ethnography) and following four topics – natural history, ethnography, moral character, and literature – the focus of Northern Memories is on how texts, with or without any direct connections to one another, reproduced shared tropes and outlooks and on how this reproduction cumulatively furthered large cultural ideas.