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 Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.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 The Memory Monster written by Yishai Sarid and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 143 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 The Long Journey Home written by Margaret Robison and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-05-17 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First introduced to the world in her sons’ now-classic memoirs—Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye—Margaret Robison now tells her own haunting and lyrical story. A poet and teacher by profession, Robison describes her Southern Gothic childhood, her marriage to a handsome, brilliant man who became a split-personality alcoholic and abusive husband, the challenges she faced raising two children while having psychotic breakdowns of her own, and her struggle to regain her sanity. Robison grew up in southern Georgia, where the façade of 1950s propriety masked all sorts of demons, including alcoholism, misogyny, repressed homosexuality, and suicide. She met her husband, John Robison, in college, and together they moved up north, where John embarked upon a successful academic career and Margaret brought up the children and worked on her art and poetry. Yet her husband’s alcoholism and her collapse into psychosis, and the eventual disintegration of their marriage, took a tremendous toll on their family: Her older son, John Elder, moved out of the house when he was a teenager, and her younger son, Chris (who later renamed himself Augusten), never completed high school. When Margaret met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, the therapist who was treating her husband, she felt understood for the first time and quickly fell under his idiosyncratic and, eventually, harmful influence. Robison writes movingly and honestly about her mental illness, her shortcomings as a parent, her difficult marriage, her traumatic relationship with Dr. Turcotte, and her two now-famous children, Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, who have each written bestselling memoirs about their family. She also writes inspiringly about her hard-earned journey to sanity and clarity. An astonishing and enduring story, The Long Journey Home is a remarkable and ultimately uplifting account of a complicated, afflicted twentieth-century family.
Download or read book Breath Eyes Memory written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, now an established classic--revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.
Download or read book Memory in Literature written by S. Nalbantian and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-11-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to discover and probe in depth memory phenomena captured in literary works. Using literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, this comparative study of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz, including Proust, Breton, Woolf and Faulkner, uncovers valuable material for the classification of the memory process. Nalbantian's daring interdisciplinary work, involving literature, science, and art, forges a new model for dialogue between the disciplines.
Download or read book Memory in Culture written by A. Erll and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book questions the sociocultural dimensions of remembering. It offers an overview of the history and theory of memory studies through the lens of sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, literature, art and media studies; documenting current international and interdisciplinary memory research in an unprecedented way.
Download or read book The Memory Police written by Yoko Ogawa and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB American Book Award winner
Download or read book Music Memory Resistance written by Sandra Pouchet Paquet and published by Ian Randle Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Calypsonians have long been the 'voice of the people', delivering the complaints, criticisms and even the solutions to political leaders. In its earliest manifestations, calypso music emerged in response to a cultural climate that demanded creative modes of expression that could both resist and record political and historical changes taking place in Trinidad and Tobago. Since the 1920s and 1930s, calypsonians typically have composed songs that chronicle their observations and opinions on current events focusing on specific occurrences, from local scandals to current affairs while also examining broader trends. Not only has calypso served as an unofficial record of historical events, it emerged as a cultural weapon that yielded tremendous sway within the general audiences of the Caribbean region. This collection includes contributions from calypsonians, critics, novelists and poets alike, all engaged in representing Caribbean culture in its myriad forms. It represents an array of convergences across critical perspectives, political and social agendas, generations and national boundaries. The work of numerous calypsonians and other singers are explored, including Sparrow; Kitchener; Chalkdust; Denise Belfon; and writers such as Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Errol John, Paul Marshall, Earl Lovelace and Lashkmi Persaud. The comparative analyses provide an interdisciplinary approach to Cultural Studies making the volume essential reading for students, scholars and calypso enthusiasts. "
Download or read book Culture and the Literary written by Avishek Parui and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-01-26 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture and the Literary is a study of how cultural codes are constructed, consumed and conveyed as represented in selected works of fiction and non-fiction. Examining cultural studies as a discipline by revisiting some of its seminal figures, the book includes a study of selected literary as well as non-fictional texts. It offers a unique combination of three major theoretical frames: memory studies, thing theory, and affect studies. Drawing on fictional representations, theoretical frames and historical events, this book aims to provide a unique perspective into how culture as a phenomenon is represented, reified and re-membered in the world we inhabit today.
Download or read book The Book of Memory written by Mary Carruthers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 875 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).
Download or read book Tell Me an Ending written by Jo Harkin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About a tech company that deletes unwanted memories, the consequences for those forced to contend with what they tried to forget, and the dissenting doctor who seeks to protect her patients from further harm
Download or read book Literature and Cultural Memory written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied. High and low culture as texts embedded in the texture of memory, as well as material culture as a communal receptacle and reservoir of memory are analysed in their historical contingency. Symbolic representations of accepted and counter history/ies, and the cultural nodes and mechanisms of the cultural imaginary are also issues of central interest. Twenty-six contributions tackle these topics from a theoretical and historical perspective and bring to the fore case studies illustrating the interdisciplinary agenda that underlies the volume. Contributors: Luis Manuel A.V. Bernardo, Lina Bolzoni, Peter Burke, Pia Brinzeu, Adina Ciugureanu, Thomas Docherty, Christoph Ehland, Herbert Grabes, László Gyapay, Donna Landry, Christoph Lehner, Gerald MacLean, Dragoş Manea, Daniel Melo, Mirosława Modrzewska, Rareş Moldovan, C.W.R.D. Mosely, Petruţa Năiduţ, Francesca Orestano, Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Andreea Paris, Leonor Santa Bárbara, Hans-Peter Söder, Jukka Tiusanen, Ludmila Volná, Ioana Zirra.
Download or read book The Memory of Love written by Aminatta Forna and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] luminous tale of passion and betrayal” set in the post-colonial and civil war eras of Sierra Leone (The New York Times). Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book As a decade of civil war and political unrest comes to a devastating close, three men must reconcile themselves to their own fate and the fate of their broken nation. For Elias Cole, this means reflecting on his time as a young scholar in 1969 and the affair that defined his life. For Adrian Lockheart, it means listening to Elias’s tale and following his own heart into a heated romance. For Elias’s doctor, Kai Mansaray, it’s desperately battling his nightmares by trying to heal his patients. As each man’s story becomes inexorably bound with the others’, they discover that they are connected not only by their shared heritage, pain, and shame, but also by one remarkable woman. The Memory of Love is a beautiful and ambitious exploration of the influence history can have on generations, and the shared cultural burdens that each of us inevitably face. “A soft-spoken story of brutality and endurance set in postwar Sierra Leone . . . Tragedy and its aftermath are affectingly, memorably evoked in this multistranded narrative from a significant talent.” —Kirkus Reviews
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 Literature Literary History and Cultural Memory written by Herbert Grabes and published by Gunter Narr Verlag. This book was released on 2005 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Forget Memory written by Anne Davis Basting and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory loss can be one of the most terrifying aspects of a diagnosis of dementia. Yet the fear and dread of losing our memory make the experience of the disease worse than it needs to be, according to cultural critic and playwright Anne Davis Basting. She says, Forget memory. Basting emphasizes the importance of activities that focus on the present to improve the lives of persons with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Based on ten years of practice and research in the field, Basting’s study includes specific examples of innovative programs that stimulate growth, humor, and emotional connection; translates into accessible language a wide range of provocative academic works on memory; and addresses how advances in medical research and clinical practice are already pushing radical changes in care for persons with dementia. Bold, optimistic, and innovative, Basting's cultural critique of dementia care offers a vision for how we can change the way we think about and care for people with memory loss.
