Download or read book The Burden of Memory the Muse of Forgiveness written by Wole Soyinka and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-17 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka considers all of Africa--indeed, all the world--as he poses this question: once repression stops, is reconciliation between oppressor and victim possible? In the face of centuries-long devastation wrought on the African continent and her Diaspora by slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, and the manifold faces of racism, what form of recompense could possibly suffice? In a voice as eloquent and humane as it is forceful, Soyinka boldly challenges in these pages the notions of simple forgiveness, confession, and absolution as strategies for social healing. Ultimately, he turns to art--poetry, music, painting, etc.--as the one source that can nourish the seed of reconciliation: art is the generous vessel that can hold together the burden of memory and the hope of forgiveness. Based on Soyinka's Stewart-McMillan lectures delivered at the DuBois Institute at Harvard, The Burden of Memory speaks not only to those concerned specifically with African politics, but also to anyone seeking the path to social justice through some of history's most inhospitable terrain.
Download or read book Burden of Memory written by Vicki Delany and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2009-12-08 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elaine Benson, a successful novelist who jettisoned her career over an unreliable screenwriter, is now divorced, broke, and come to a ''primitive, untamed northern forest'' on Lake Muskoka to interview for a job. Elderly Miss Moira Madison of the fabulous
Download or read book The Burden of the Past written by Anna Wylegala and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on how chaos, totalitarianism, and trauma have shaped Ukraine’s culture: “A milestone of the scholarship about Eastern European politics of memory.” —Wulf Kansteiner, Aarhus University In a century marked by totalitarian regimes, genocide, mass migrations, and shifting borders, the concept of memory in Eastern Europe is often synonymous with notions of trauma. In Ukraine, memory mechanisms were disrupted by political systems seeking to repress and control the past in order to form new national identities supportive of their own agendas. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, memory in Ukraine was released, creating alternate visions of the past, new national heroes, and new victims. This release of memories led to new conflicts and “memory wars.” How does the past exist in contemporary Ukraine? The works collected in The Burden of the Past focus on commemorative practices, the politics of history, and the way memory influences Ukrainian politics, identity, and culture. The works explore contemporary memory culture in Ukraine and the ways in which it is being researched and understood. Drawing on work from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and political scientists, the collection represents a truly interdisciplinary approach. Taken together, the groundbreaking scholarship collected in The Burden of the Past provides insight into how memories can be warped and abused, and how this abuse can have lasting effects on a country seeking to create a hopeful future.
Download or read book The Book of Memory written by Petina Gappah and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. Memory, the narrator of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, after being sentenced for murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers? Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between past and present, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award–winning writer Petina Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.
Download or read book In Memory of Memory written by Maria Stepanova and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
Download or read book Violence and the Burden of Memory written by Sasanka Perera and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Burden of Memory the Muse of Forgiveness written by Wole Soyinka and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-12-03 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka considers all of Africa--indeed, all the world--as he poses this question: once repression stops, is reconciliation between oppressor and victim possible? In the face of centuries-long devastation wrought on the African continent and her Diaspora by slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, and the manifold faces of racism, what form of recompense could possibly suffice? In a voice as eloquent and humane as it is forceful, Soyinka boldly challenges in these pages the notions of simple forgiveness, confession, and absolution as strategies for social healing. Ultimately, he turns to art--poetry, music, painting, etc.--as the one source that can nourish the seed of reconciliation: art is the generous vessel that can hold together the burden of memory and the hope of forgiveness. Based on Soyinka's Stewart-McMillan lectures delivered at the DuBois Institute at Harvard, The Burden of Memory speaks not only to those concerned specifically with African politics, but also to anyone seeking the path to social justice through some of history's most inhospitable terrain.
Download or read book Memory as Burden and Liberation written by Anna Wolff-Powęska and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines ways in which Germans struggle with the Nazi past. It is a reflection upon the reasons why German reckoning with the past became a process of contradictions and shows the specific character of German collective memory in relation to the helplessness and moral condition of a nation defending itself in the face of unimaginable evil.
Download or read book Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa written by Ussama Makdisi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-14 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the relation between histories of violence and their contemporary commemoration.
Download or read book The Memory Monster written by Yishai Sarid and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it? Praise for The Memory Monster: “Award-winning Israeli novelist Sarid’s latest work is a slim but powerful novel, rendered beautifully in English by translator Greenspan…. Propelled by the narrator’s distinctive voice, the novel is an original variation on one of the most essential themes of post-Holocaust literature: While countless writers have asked the question of where, or if, humanity can be found within the profoundly inhumane, Sarid incisively shows how preoccupation and obsession with the inhumane can take a toll on one’s own humanity…. it is, if not an indictment of Holocaust memorialization, a nuanced and trenchant consideration of its layered politics. Ultimately, Sarid both refuses to apologize for Jewish rage and condemns the nefarious forms it sometimes takes. A bold, masterful exploration of the banality of evil and the nature of revenge, controversial no matter how it is read.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “[A] record of a breakdown, an impassioned consideration of memory and its risks, and a critique of Israel’s use of the Holocaust to shape national identity…. Sarid’s unrelenting examination of how narratives of the Holocaust are shaped makes for much more than the average confessional tale.” —Publishers Weekly “Reading The Memory Monster, which is written as a report to the director of Yad Vashem, felt like both an extremely intimate experience and an eerily clinical Holocaust history lesson. Perfectly treading the fine line between these two approaches, Sarid creates a haunting exploration of collective memory and an important commentary on humanity. How do we remember the Holocaust? What tolls do we pay to carry on memory? This book hit me viscerally, emotionally, and personally. The Memory Monster is brief, but in its short account Sarid manages to lay bare the tensions between memory and morals, history and nationalism, humanity and victimhood. An absolute must-read.” —Julia DeVarti, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “In Yishai Sarid’s dark, thoughtful novel The Memory Monster, a Holocaust historian struggles with the weight of his profession…. The Memory Monster is a novel that pulls no punches in its exploration of the responsibility—and the cost—of holding vigil over the past.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews
Download or read book Memory History Forgetting written by Paul Ricoeur and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Politics of Memory written by Ifi Amadiume and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2000-07 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Binaifer Nowrojee and Regan Ralph.
Download or read book The Great Believers written by Rebecca Makkai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by Amy Poehler • One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “A page turner . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” —The New York Times Book Review A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. Named a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, The Seattle Times, Bustle, Newsday, AM New York, BookPage, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library and Chicago Public Library
Download or read book The End of Memory written by Miroslav Volf and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award in Christianity and Culture How should we remember atrocities? Should we ever forgive abusers? Can we not hope for final reconciliation, even if it means redeemed victims and perpetrators spending eternity together? We live in an age that insists that past wrongs—genocides, terrorist attacks, bald personal injustices—should never be forgotten. But Miroslav Volf here proposes the radical idea that letting go of such memories—after a certain point and under certain conditions—may actually be a gift of grace we should embrace. Volf’s personal stories of persecution and interrogation frame his search for theological resources to make memories a wellspring of healing rather than a source of deepening pain and animosity. Controversial, thoughtful, and incisively reasoned, The End of Memory begins a conversation that we avoid to our great detriment. This second edition includes an appendix on the memories of perpetrators as well as victims, a response to critics, and a James K. A. Smith interview with Volf about the nature and function of memory in the Christian life.
Download or read book The Memory Eaters written by Elizabeth Kadetsky and published by UMass + ORM. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On autopsy, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient can weigh as little as 30 percent of a healthy brain. The tissue grows porous. It is a sieve through which the past slips. As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct—easy to hold. At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.
Download or read book Telling Secrets written by Frederick Buechner and published by Harper San Francisco. This book was released on 1991 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unabashedly Christian....a meditation on the connection between knowing and sharing secrets and discovering the reality of a loving and merciful God. --Chicago Tribune Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book The Memory Palace written by Mira Bartok and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gorgeous memoir about the 17 year estrangement of the author and her homeless schizophrenic mother, and their reunion.
