Memories as the Articulation of Being in Vladimir Besleaga’s Novels

This article analyzes the problem of recovering personal and cultural identity of the characters in Vladimir Besleaga's novels Zbor frânt (Broken Flight) and Viața și moartea nefericitului Filimon (The Life and Death of the Unfortunate Filimon). The main role in the journey of self-search belongs to the involuntary memory and intuition, which drive the protagonists through a series of events, the ones from the bitter, disturbing past, to finally discovering the magical dimension of childhood, revealing mysteries about one's own split up destiny. Memories and the anamnesis process represent, therefore, the divine act of restoring the primordial world, of uttering the being and resurrecting the mankurt to the conscious, free and full life. Beyond the hostile reality of the regime, both Isai and Filimon reveal unique experiences and feelings from the labyrinth of their own consciousness, which bring them closer to the essence of existence.

The geometry of artistic space in the works by Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

The article considers the peculiarities of the artistic system in the works by the French writer of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, VLGE Marcel Proust. The foundations of his aesthetic views, which are manifested primarily at the level of the structural organisation in the novel cycle “In Search of Lost Timeˮ are studied. The specificity of the narrative, where the main role is played by involuntary memory, allows us to speak about the special geometry of the artistic space in this work. It happens due to Proust's rejection of “plane psychologyˮ in favour of “psychology in time”. It is shown how on such a basis, thanks to the mnemonic mechanism, a complex connection of spontaneously arising spatial fragments with the temporal moments of existence arises and the chronotopic structure of the novel, built on the principle of relativity, is constructed where time becomes, in fact, the fourth dimension of space.

"beaucoup plus modal que tonal"

Focusing on three of Dutilleux's mid to late orchestral works - "Timbres, espace, movement ou La Nuit etoile" (1978), "The Shadows of Time" (1997) and "Sur le meme accord" (2002) - this article gives insight into Henri Dutilleux's scale-defined pitch organization techniques and the role of colour in the works of the French composer. The paper questions the ambiguous relationship between tonality and modality, and asserts the previously only peripherally attested importance of modes for Dutilleux's works. An analysis of pitch organization demonstrates how Dutilleux's aesthetic and literature-inspired concepts of "progressive growing" function musically by foregrounding pivot chords or notes, and how their return reflects the idea of involuntary memory ("memo ire involuntaire") derived from Marcel Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu".

“Saudades da festa!”: Triggering sensory memories of DIY electronic music through multimodal practices

DIY electronic music parties in São Paulo are deeply immersive, corporeal and sensorial. In March 2020, due to the pandemic, the parties stopped, and the scene gradually moved online manifesting itself on a new type of canvas. However, the digital manifestations of the virtual scene lost their performative and multisensorial appeal. By using multimodal elicitation methods (photos, videos, audio tracks, internet memories) this article is exploring the triggered or involuntary memory of embodied and sensorial affects that are being recalled and missed by the “clubbers.” The article intends to exhibit autoethnographic memories of party participation while problematizing the way in which the memory of this missed intense experience comes from a regular attendance to electronic music gatherings and its relationship with the complex feeling of “saudade.”

A Proustian Reading of Michel Onfray's Cosmos and Christian Signol's Les vrais bonheurs: "Privileged Moments" of Sensorial Ecstasy

This study probes the philosophical significance of the strange joy induced by a trigger sensation that immediately strikes the reader in Michel Onfray’s Cosmos and Christian Signol’s Les vrais bonheurs. Heavily influenced by Proust’s vision of involuntary memory, the role of the senses, and the nature of time in A la recherche du temps perdu, Onfray and Signol attempt to explore the essence of everything in the context of powerful, transformative sensorial encounters. Some critics automatically dismiss the rending ecstasy depicted by the Proustian narrator in the “petite madeleine” scene as nothing more than a form of whimsical artistry. However, Onfray and Signol’s rewriting of this renowned passage demonstrates that the notion of a privileged moment, associated with Proust in French literary circles, is an all-encompassing metaphor for delving into the most fundamental philosophical questions of all.

Do intuitive ideas of the qualities that should characterize involuntary and voluntary memories affect their classification?

It is assumed that the difference between voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memories lies in the intentionality to retrieve a memory assigned by the experimenter. Memories that are retrieved when people are instructed to do so in response to cues are considered voluntary (VAMs), those that pop up spontaneously are considered involuntary (IAMs). VAMs and IAMs so classified are also found to differ in terms of phenomenological characteristics, such as perceived accessibility, vividness etc. These differences are assumed to be due to differences in intentionality and the different retrieval processes at play. It is possible, however, that these differences (which are subjective attributions of phenomenological characteristics) are the result of metacognitive beliefs of what IAMs and VAMs should be. In two experiments, we investigated the possible role of these metacognitive beliefs. Participants rated IAMs and VAMs on a number of phenomenological characteristics in two conditions, when these memories were presented in blocks that specified whether they were retrieved in a voluntary or involuntary task, or when presented in a mixed list with no information provided. If metacognitive beliefs influence the reporting of memory properties, then the block presentation would increase the differences between the characteristics of the two types of memories. The results showed that, besides replicating the characteristics of IAMs and VAMs already observed in the literature, there were almost no differences between the blocked and the mixed lists. We discuss the results as supporting the idea that the difference in characteristics attributed to IAMs and VAMs reflect a genuine difference in the nature of the retrieval and is not the result of pre-existing metacognitive belief on what a voluntary and an involuntary memory should be.

Right Hemisphere Memory Bias Does Not Extend to Involuntary Memories for Negative Scenes

Attention is unequally distributed across the visual field. Due to greater right than left hemisphere activation for visuospatial attention, people attend slightly more to the left than the right side. As a result, people voluntarily remember visual stimuli better when it first appears in the left than the right visual field. But does this effect—termed a right hemisphere memory bias—also enhance involuntary memory? We manipulated the presentation location of 100 highly negative images (chosen to increase the likelihood that participants would experience any involuntary memories) in three conditions: predominantly leftward (right hemisphere bias), predominantly rightward (left hemisphere bias), or equally in both visual fields (bilateral). We measured subsequent involuntary memories immediately and for 3 days after encoding. Contrary to predictions, biased hemispheric processing did not affect short- or long-term involuntary memory frequency or duration. Future research should measure hemispheric differences at retrieval, rather than just encoding.