The Generation of Forgetting

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Beiner
Keyword(s):  
Travel Literature ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Vernacular Poetry ◽  
United Irishmen

Social forgetting is generated through discreet processing of traumatic historical experiences that cannot be expressed in official representations of public memory. Following the defeat of the 1798 rebellion, former rebels could not be openly memorialised. Epitaphs on graves of United Irishmen were deliberately obscured. Both Catholics and Protestants were unwilling to put their recollections of the rebellion on record. Local memories were noted in travel literature and vernacular poetry offered a medium of remembrance that was less noticeable to outsiders. However, cultural memory can be misleading. Literary representations in historical fiction contributed to social forgetting by covering up less savoury aspects of the rebellion. Towards the end of their lives, elderly members of the generation that had witnessed the events experienced ‘post-memory angst’ and shared with dedicated collectors of historical traditions their memories, which had been shaped through practices of concealment and were full of hesitations.

Regenerated Forgetting

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Beiner
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
United Irishmen

Traditions of social forgetting, whereby awkward historical episodes are not commemorated in public but are still remembered in obscure forms, can be passed on over generations. With time, muted memories can emerge into the open, yet they still reflect various forms of restraint. The spread of Orangeism in Ulster, alongside unionist concerns about the rise of nationalism, provided a forceful context for disremembering Protestant involvement in the United Irishmen. The emergence of relics from 1798, including occasional discovery of skeletons, were salient reminders of the past. Whereas works of historical fiction that did not correspond to local traditions of the Turn-Out failed to attract attention, literary representations of folk memory were received with enthusiasm by popular readerships. Towards the end of the century, antiquarian interest fed into a cultural revival in Ulster, which was determined to bring long-hidden memories of Ninety-Eight into the public sphere.

Pancho Villa: The Making of a Modern Legend

1964 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Brandt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Media ◽  
Magazine Articles

What makes a man—or the public memory of a man—into a a legend? The Western world has always had legendary heroes, men who in life waged vigorous campaigns against terrifying odds, and who, in death, bear reputations burnished and embellished and gloriously expanded by the stories their admirers tell. Dietrich of Berne, Frederick Barbarossa, Alexander of Macedon, Charlemagne, the Cid, Russia’s Prince Igor, Cordoba’s Great Captain, and others, live on in legend centuries after their physical lives ended. The stories of these heroes are told in sagas, epics, and lays, in ballads and folksongs, romances and myths. There are also heroes more newly-made. Their stories are broadcast through the media of twentieth-century communication: popular biographies, historical fiction, diplomatic telegrams, reports of senatorial committees, newspaper accounts, magazine articles, motion pictures. Mexico provided the pre-eminent legendary hero of modern times: Pancho Villa.

scholarly journals As voces dos recordos: memoria oral, pasado traumático e novela na Galiza actual

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Diego Rivadulla Costa
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Formal Point

Voices of memories: Oral memory, traumatic past and the novel in contemporary GaliciaThe fictionalisation of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in the Galician novel has experienced a significant evolution from a thematic and formal point of view. This evolution has been greatly influenced by the memory boom since the beginning of the 21st century, both in Galicia and the rest of Spain. Therefore, exploring the contemporary Galician narrative corpus requires an interdisciplinary approach to address not only the literary representations of history and memory, but also the functions acquired by those narratives in connection with the context as well as the cultural memory of the Galician people. This paper focuses on the relationship between memory and orality in some of these texts in order to analyse how oral memory emerges in the novel as a form of persistence of the past in current times. This oral memory becomes a key element in many of these narratives and faces a deliberate collective amnesia and the reluctance to remember, acting as a space for resistance that connects the past and present in the texts.

scholarly journals The Impossibility of the Wenderoman: History, Retrospective, and Conciliation

Konturen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 167 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Donahue
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Temporal Perspective ◽  
Political Literature ◽  
Social Agenda ◽  
The One ◽  
Literature And Film

“The Impossibility of the Wenderoman” argues against the conventional conception of the Wenderoman (and of thematically related films and plays) that views it essentially as a kind of cultural document of the German “Wende.” Placing the question within the larger problematic of historical fiction and political literature, this paper notes first that the very genre is itself an impossibility insofar as its boundaries are ever-expanding. The quintessential contribution of the genre, this paper argues, is twofold: retrospective and “conciliatory.” It is the first insofar as we are willing to look beyond literature and film that focuses principally on the Wende per se, and instead take Unification as a juncture from which truly to look back (taking advantage of the new temporal perspective given us by “the turn”), and thus reevaluate Cold War conventions, specifically those governing German-German and German-American cultural relations that often went unquestioned in the postwar period. In other words, the Wenderoman dimension I elaborate (drawing especially on Kempowski’s Letzte Gruesse) may contribute to a more profound understanding of the period it “closes” than the one it ostensibly celebrates and inaugurates. Secondly, the Wenderoman functions as a prominent vehicle of cultural memory, preserving various moments of a Marxist-inspired social agenda for future generations. Agamben’s notion of “the contemporary” as well as foundational concepts of “cultural memory” are useful here. The discussion features well-known films (Good Bye, Lenin! and Das Leben der Anderen), theater (Brussig’s Leben bis Maenner), as well as several novels. Whether this process of cultural “sifting” will remain purely elegiac, or serve as a resource for imagining alternative social possibilities in the future is of course impossible to know—both because it is far too general of a hypothesis, and still far too early to tell.

Rewriting Renaissance ornithology: Jean Baptiste Faultrier's “Traitté general des oyseaux” (1660)

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. CHARMANTIER ◽  
M. GREENGRASS ◽  
T. R. BIRKHEAD
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Travel Literature

“Traitté general des oyseaux” was written in 1660 by Jean Baptiste Faultrier, a taxman working in Louis XIV's royal hunting lodge. The 787-page, un-illustrated manuscript was dedicated to the all-powerful Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's superintendent of the finances. Faultrier used an impressive variety of sources, from the natural history treatises of Aldrovandi and Belon, to falconry treatises, Italian bird-keeping manuals, Thevet's travel literature, and husbandry books. Faultrier's work brought together many facets of ornithology, and placed natural history, hunting and bird-keeping on the same level. Although on a par with Jonston's De avibus (1650), Faultrier's “Traitté” was never printed and remained unknown until 2004. Analysis of the content reveals how Faultrier worked and his aim in writing such a manuscript, which is one of the only ornithology works of seventeenth-century France.

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