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"Autobiographical memory Fiction."
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One spoon on this earth
\"An autobiographical novel that takes a life to pieces, putting forward not a coherent, straightforward narrative, but a series of dazzling images ranging from the ordinary to the unbelievable, fished from the depths of the author's memory as well as from the stream of his day-to-day life as an adult author. Interweaving flashes of the horrific Jeju Uprising and the Korean War with pleasant family anecdotes, stories of schoolroom cruelty, and bizarre digressions into his personal mythology, One Spoon on this Earth stands a sort of digest of contemporary Korean history as it might be seen through the lens of one man's life and opinions\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Remembering Someone Else's Past: The Social Psychology of Odysseus’ Fake Autobiographies (Od. 14 and 19)
This article discusses some social and psychological aspects involved in two of Odysseus’ lying tales (Od. 14.192–359 and 19.165–248). If one understands remembering as reconstructing the past, this reconstructive element leaves room for forgery and deception. Telling credible lies involves many of the same cognitive structures used in the sharing of authentic personal memories. Odysseus’ fake autobiographical stories in the guise of a Cretan beggar offer an interesting case study of this overlap between reconstructed memories and credible lies. Drawing on recent studies on autobiographical memory and on parallel examples in our contemporary world, the aim of this paper is to analyse some narrative and psychological features of Odysseus’ fake memories, as well as the social functions that they fulfil in the fiction of the poem. It will be shown that, speaking with Eumaios, Odysseus builds his story using a conventional structure common to ‘truthful’ autobiographies in the fictional world of the epics, while with Penelope his autobiographical memories are co-narrated during the dialogue, guided by the emotions mutually aroused between narrator and narratee.
Journal Article
Memory, Truth, and Fiction in Doris Lessing's Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
A closer analysis of her autobiography reveals how these three elements, memory, truth, and fiction, are complexly knotted into a pattern in her writing. [...]despite the limits of the memory as caused by childhood amnesia, Lessing strives for alternative methods to revive her experience of early childhood. [...]after several attempts to refigure events of her early childhood and her parents' lives in Under My Skin and The Memoirs of a Survivor, in her final book, Alfred & Emily, Lessing again comes back to her childhood in Southern Rhodesia and her troubled relationship with her parents. Furthermore, an attempt to appraise her writing solely within an aesthetic framework is quite misleading. [...]beyond the aesthetic function Lessing's writing explores several intricacies within the area of self and writing (Vappala 179).
Journal Article
Vertigo
A unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again the readers' guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid the restless literary ghosts of Kafka, Stendhal, and Casanova. In four dizzying sections, Sebald, one of the most acclaimed European writers of our time, plunges the reader into vertigo, into that \"swimming of the head\" as Webster defines it.
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Tying Memories into a Pattern: William Golding’s Free Fall as Autobiografiction and Trauma Narrative / William Golding’in Serbest Düşüş Romanının Kurgusal Otobiyografi ve Travma Anlatısı Olarak İncelemesi
William Golding’s 1959 Free Fall depicts the narrator/character Samuel Montjoy’s retrospective interrogation of his past in his “non-chronological” autobiography to understand his present self. His first-person narration is a journey into his memories presented according to their importance for him at different stages of his life (the narrated self) and shows the role of memory in shaping the present self (the narrating self). The narrator regulates his memories to conceive a coherent pattern in his autobiographical account which will also give meaning to his life and help construct a unified identity. However, he adopts a structure that has to rely on his remembering/forgetting, which problematizes the idea of constructing the self through unreliable memory. With this quality of the novel as an early example of the “fiction of memory,” Golding’s text is inventive and looks forward to contemporary narrative approaches to autobiographical writing. Free Fall has been widely studied as an existentialist novel due to the novelist’s questioning the concepts of freedom to choose and fall through the protagonist’s quest for self-knowledge. However, the aim of this study is to analyse Golding’s work as autobiografiction and trauma narrative where the text presents an account of the protagonist’s attempt for reconstructing the self through memories subject to his modifications and offers the therapeutic use of his self-narration.
Journal Article
Blauwal der Erinnerung : Roman
A novel about the forgotten Ukranian folk-hero Wjatschelslaw Lypynskyj, whose life and artful ways is linked with the first-person narrator: she searches in his past for traces that she may be reconciled better with her own present. Tanja Maljartschuk narrates cleverly and imaginatively about the search for belonging and the power of remembering. From back cover.
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\Speak, Mnemosyne\: Genre Performance and Metagenre in Petina Gappah's Memoir-Novel: The Book of Memory
This article contends that the genre of the memoir-novel is inherently metageneric in purpose and design, arguing that it combines the novel's aesthetic and thematic diversity with the memoir's confessional self-reflection in order to produce self-referential comments on the characteristics of both genres, while simultaneously drawing attention to its own, hybrid form. Petina Gappah's The Book of Memory (2015) is a memoir-novel that exemplifies several forms of metagenre. The analysis identifies the novel's foregrounding of its own production as a story, its confessional qualities, the self-reflexive and retrospective construction of memories, and the implementation of telling names as a convention of other genres as explicit forms of metagenre; implicit forms include inter- and transtextual references to Greek mythology, to the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, and to different cultural narratives. Among the implicit forms, there is also the protagonist's suggestion that her narration of her own story is based on unreliable memories, which undermines her credibility and hence deviates from the genre convention of the memoir-novel. Gappah's novel moreover contains examples of implicit metagenre that are transformed into explicit forms: it foregrounds the status of progressive myths as cultural narratives in order to subvert them, and it stages genre conventions of the memoir-novel as motifs. Both conversions are transpositions that have the potential to substantiate as well as undermine the subjective, confessional quality of the memoir-novel, suggesting a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of metagenre overall.
Journal Article
Waterland
Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.
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Remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction
With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.
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