National History and Generational Memory

This article explores a recent stage of the national project in Taiwan as reflected in comic books. It compares historical comics and graphic memoirs as lieux de mémoire (according to Pierre Nora) and as stories that define Taiwan, situated between the historical apparatus and cultural memory (in Marita Sturken’s terms). It argues that the memoirs’ higher potential appeal is based on their relevance to contemporary concerns, on building links between the wu nianji 五年級 (fifth-grader) generation and present-day youth, and on depicting history as recoverable through elements of everyday life. The article also highlights borrowings from existing discourses of national history in the analyzed memoirs and their new contributions thereto: a focus on the postwar period; a strong generational consciousness; an idea of historical continuity as embodied in present everyday life; a nonantagonistic approach to national history that transcends ethnic and political divides and positions Taiwan in the midst of global flows; and a nonelite view of Taiwan’s most recent history grounded in popular culture.

Reincarnation of Memory, or Portrait of Generation in the Interior of Time: “Children of the Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna

The paper analyzes the tetralogy of novels by Dokiia Humenna “Children of the Milky Way” in the context of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora fiction. The researcher raises such issues as the genre nature, narrator’s position, problem of the relationship between the categories of time and space, and the alternative autobiography of the novel. The process of writing the novel is considered as an attempt to normalize the writer’s own traumatic experience, caused by two decades of totalitarian terror and repressions. Dokiia Humenna’s novel is regarded in the context of such genres as family chronicle and ‘novel of generations’, which was updated in Ukrainian literature of the post-war period as an attempt to overcome the threatening tendencies of the entropy. At the same time, considering the fact that the novel was written on the verge of fiction and documentaries, the researcher suggested reviewing the work in the context of testimonial literature. It is emphasized that ideas of generational consciousness and generational dimension of time shape the novel, and the concept of generation is associated with categories of ancestry, memory, trauma, and identity. The generation of Ukrainian 1920s, which Dokiia Humenna considers as her own, emerges in the novel as a complex and heterogeneous socio-cultural phenomenon, represented by historical fi gures that became symbols and signs of their time (Mykola Khvylovyi, Mykola Zerov, and others), by literary stories of their alter ego, and fictional characters, sometimes based on several real prototypes. The myth of primordialism is one of the most important in the novel. It is represented by the archetype of a hamlet, a patriarchal micromodel of Ukraine, traditional in classical Ukrainian literature. In addition, the author of the paper raised a question about the presence of the writer’s alternative autobiographies in the novel, which might be the ways of constructing her own identity.

Modern French Intellectual Generations

This chapter presents a generational examination of important modern French intellectuals and will help situate the nouveaux théologiens more deeply within the context of French avant-garde life. First, the chapter briefly examines the concept of generation, by which French intellectuals identified themselves. Generational theory is a method of cultural history used successfully by French historians to analyse modern intellectual life. Second, there is a brief examination of the slow rise of generational consciousness in the nineteenth century, on which later generational theory was ultimately based. This will lead to a better understanding of an important concern: generational consciousness in the twentieth century. Third, the chapter outlines the French intellectual generations of the first half of the twentieth century, the very generations to which the nouvelle théologiens were responding or belonged. It looks at the generation of crisis and the effects of World War I.

‘The one you watched when you were twelve’: Regenerations ofDoctor Whoand Enduring Fandom's ‘Life-Transitional Objects’

In this article I return to the fannish transitional object, relating fandom across the life course (Harrington and Bielby 2013) to recent critical concepts of ‘consumed nostalgia’ and ‘mediated nostalgia’ (Cross 2015; Lizardi 2015), both of which imply that ‘enduring fandom’ can represent an unhealthy holding on to the past. Challenging this, I turn to Christopher Bollas’ (1993) notion of ‘generational consciousness’, considering instead how a long-running British science fiction TV series such as Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963–) can become a ‘generational object’ for multiple cohorts of fans (Booth and Kelly 2013), this being recognised through fan discourses of ‘my Doctor’. I also examine how changes in the fan object linked to recasting and reimagining are drawn on by fans to understand the ageing of their own generation, and its movement from a culturally powerful ‘illusion’ (that the text is meant for them), to disillusionment (that Doctor Who is now aimed at younger audiences, and hence they may no longer be culturally central to its meanings and practices). If we can identify ‘media generations’ (Bolin 2017), then this calls for a greater exploration of how media attachments, retained by fans across many decades, can act as life-transitional objects within experiences of ageing. I conclude by addressing the ‘textual ageing’ of Doctor Who, demonstrating how the programme denies its own metaphorical ‘life cycle’ (Harrington 2016) in favour of always regenerating, even while it simultaneously trades on the cultural/heritage value of being more than 50 years old.

Youth, Generations, and Collective Action in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Italy

This article examines concepts of youth, maturity, and generations in nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy and perceived connections between young people and political and social unrest. I demonstrate that, rather than being consistent, the involvement of younger generations in radicalism was uneven, and varied significantly with historical contexts. I argue that the authorities frequently exaggerated associations between young people and radicalism as a subtle strategy of exclusion, as a means of downgrading the significance of collective action and portraying it as a criminal, emotional, or even recreational matter rather than a political one, a tendency that has often been reinforced in the historiography. Descriptions of youth and maturity should not be understood as merely reflections of age. They were not value-free, and served as indicators of individuals' social standing and political agency or lack thereof. Yet fighting in a rebellion offered an alternative to marriage, owning property, or education for the achievement of “manhood,” or adult status and political agency. The article also investigates how the Great Irish Famine shaped generational consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century through an analysis of the participants in nationalist and agrarian violence. In all, over four thousand participants in collective action in Ireland and Italy are examined.