Literary narratives not only often thematize memory as a topic; they also directly represent or stage concrete processes of remembering by way of various narrative techniques. This article offers a systematic approach to these techniques which is informed both by narratology and interdisciplinary memory studies. Specifically, the contribution offers a toolbox for the analysis of what we refer to as the ›mimesis of remembering‹: through a variety of textual strategies, literary texts can create ›memory-like‹ effects. How such ›mnestic narration‹ is achieved and what functions it might fulfil is the main concern of this article. Most generally, we argue, two basic structural principles are the basis for a narrative mimesis of remembering: first, such narratives feature a centre of subjective perception, a consciousness who performs the process of remembering (either on the level of the narrative mediation or the level of the characters), and second, they need to feature at least two distinct time levels. However, not all narratives that contain these very common aspects are equally invested in representing processes of remembering. We propose to think of the mnestic quality of texts as a scalar phenomenon, where passages set in the narrative past can be more or less emphatically (and continuously) marked as rendering products or processes of remembering. Besides introducing various basic aspects of a mimesis of remembering – representation of time and space, narrative mediation and focalization, and questions of narrative unreliability –, the article not only offers a toolbox for analysis, but also discusses, on the basis of selected texts, how these aspects can be designed and combined in ways that serve to highlight a text’s mnestic qualities. We come to the conclusion that in order to fully understand these effects, one must set them into broader cultural and historical contexts. For one thing, it needs to be considered how the representations in the texts relate to evolving conceptualizations of the process of remembering itself. Moreover, one must be aware of changing narrative conventions for the representations of ›normal‹ or unmarked acts of remembering, which may also serve as a foil to foreground unusual instances.

Open Access September 9, 2022

Plotting Memory. What Are We Made to Remember When We Read Narrative Texts?

Manuel Mühlbacher

Page range: 239-263

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Abstract

While the general link between storytelling and remembering has often been underlined with regard to such topics as traumatic experience or the construction of identity, there are hardly any studies that analyse the mnestic performance that underpins the reading of narrative plots in literary texts. In order for a story to create meaning, the reader has to remember earlier events, thus becoming able to understand how conflicts arise and are resolved. If this fact seems much too obvious to require any questioning, the process of plot-related remembering takes on considerable complexity when it comes to long novelistic texts. In these cases, reading amounts to an exercise in remembering and writing becomes a way of addressing and guiding the reader’s memory. This article proposes a theory of emplotted memory, i. e. of how narrative texts create a sequence of events in the memory of the reader. It argues, furthermore, that emplotted remembering is a dimension of implied readership and that it can be analysed on a textual level. Gathering elements and cues for such a theory, the first section of the article begins with an examination of the rule laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics that the mythos of tragedy has to be easily rememberable ( eumnēmoneuton ). As the famous analogy of the animal body suggests, both the limited extension and the holistic structure of the ideal tragic plot prevent the audience from forgetting how events tie in with each other. The very intelligibility and the cathartic effect of tragedy hence depend on a mnestic activity. But whereas tragedy has to become rememberable by means of the plot’s inner structure and limited size alone, epic can use narrative techniques such as flashbacks and summaries in order to comprehend a much longer time span. In his theory of narrative desire, Peter Brooks builds on these insights and conceives plot as a dynamic process of anticipation and retrospection that heavily involves the reader’s memory. For Brooks, emplotted remembering amounts to a passionate quest for meaning: Narrative tension implies that a psychic need prevents the reader from forgetting as long as the end of the plot has not been reached. The more coherent the narrative structure of the text, the more intense the activity of emplotted remembering will be. The theoretical section of the article concludes with a review of some studies from the field of empirical psychology that have addressed the recall of stories. It turns out that the basic assumptions derived from Aristotle and Brooks – such as the importance of remembering for the comprehension of narrative, the correlation between structural coherence and memorability or the strife for meaning – are in tune with empirical findings. The goal of the article, however, is not to develop a theory that is able to predict the mnestic processes triggered by a given text. On the contrary, it uses theory as a heuristic tool that is meant to be transformed by each reading. Whereas the first section constructs a heuristic model of plot-related remembering, the second aims to account for its particularity in different texts and contexts. Its purpose is to flesh out the theory of emplotted remembering by examining the interaction of plot and memory in three romances and novels. Narrative texts give rise to various processes of remembering and forgetting that depend on plot structure, narrative technique and cultural factors. The first case study is dedicated to Yvain ou le chevalier au lion by Chrétien de Troyes. This 12 th -century romance not only tells a story of forgetting and remembering – Yvain fails to respect a deadline set by his wife Laudine and then strives to redeem himself – but also addresses the problematics of memory on a narrative level. While the protagonist begins by forgetting his engagements to Laudine, the reader’s perspective is always firmly located on the side of remembering. This effect, which is achieved by diverging measures between discourse and story time as well as by mirroring relationships between the part and the whole, testifies to the great axiological and ethical prestige of remembering in Chrétien’s text. Rodríguez de Montalvo’s lengthy romance Amadís de Gaula is at the centre of the second case study. It can be shown that the Amadís involves two kinds of emplotted memory and two corresponding sets of narrative strategies. The episodic elements of the romance invite the reader to remember minor incidents over hundreds of pages, but they are accompanied by almost no mnemotechnic hints because the intelligibility of the plot is guaranteed – even in the case of actual forgetting – by the permanent recurrence of the same schematic pattern. However, in the case of narrative strands that build up a coherent chain of causation, remembering is not an option but an absolute necessity. This is the reason why the narrator then gives extensive mnemotechnic comments in order to help the reader to tie the corresponding events together. The last case study focuses on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship . The hero’s development is contingent on the fact that he vividly remembers certain incidents from his childhood and makes new experiences in the light of his infantile impressions. While the reader is made to remember alongside Wilhelm on the level of psychological causation, Goethe’s novel also creates a network of symbolic relationships between the characters that is fully accessible to the reader alone. This network involves a sense of simultaneity and complements the linear order of the plot with a synchronic memorial dimension. The conclusion of the article suggests perspectives for further inquiry and argues that emplotted remembering is likely to respond to cultural discourses on memory. Narrative texts encourage certain practices of remembering and forgetting and can thus be understood as interventions in cultural and political debates.

Open Access September 9, 2022

The Concept of Liminality as a Theoretical Tool in Literary Memory Studies: Liminal Aspects of Memory in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Claudia Mueller-Greene

Page range: 264-288

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Abstract

There is something peculiar about memory insofar as it tends to be formed across boundaries. We can think of it as located in an in-between zone, on the threshold »where the outside world meets the world inside you« (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children ). Somehow, memory oscillates between the inside and the outside, connecting the subjective and the objective, the imaginary and the real, the self and the other, the individual and the collective. Memory involves all aspects of human life, be they biological, psychological, social, or cultural. Due to its omnipresence, memory is the object of a diverse range of disciplines. Correspondingly, the field of memory studies is situated at the intersection of a bewildering variety of disciplines, which creates exciting interdisciplinary opportunities, but also epistemological and methodological challenges. According to Mieke Bal, interdisciplinarity »must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than methods «. Liminality is a concept that seems particularly well-suited to address problems that arise from the distinctive in-between position of memory. So far, however, it has been largely ignored in memory studies. The concept of liminality deals with ›threshold‹ characteristics. Liminal phenomena and states are »betwixt and between«; they are »necessarily ambiguous« and »slip through the network of classifications« (Victor Turner). The concept of liminality helps to avoid »delusions of certainty« (Siri Hustvedt) by drawing attention to interstitial entities and processes that resist clear-cut categorizations and are inherently blurry and impalpable. »Every brain is the product of other brains« (Hustvedt) and so is memory: »we always carry with us and in us a number of distinct persons« (Maurice Halbwachs). Instead of being able to distinguish clearly between individual, social, and cultural memory, we are confronted with their dynamic interactions and complex entanglements: »to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world« (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children ). There is »the constant ›travel‹ of mnemonic contents between media and minds« (Astrid Erll), as well as their ›migration‹ from one culture to another (Aby Warburg). Memory is deeply relational and always in motion in regions of the ›between‹. This contribution focuses on these qualities through the lens of liminality. Its purpose is to introduce the concept of liminality as an analytical tool in literary memory studies and to put it to the test by applying it to a paradigmatic literary text about memory. Section one provides an introduction to the concept of liminality as it was developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner. The second section brings liminality and memory together and reflects on liminal, relational, and complex aspects of memory, with the main emphasis on complexity. In section three, the focus shifts to literature and the applicability of liminality as a concept in literary memory studies. Theories implicitly dealing with liminality are given special consideration: the triadic model of Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology, Paul Ricœur’s circle of threefold mimesis, and Homi Bhabha’s theory of ›Third Space‹. Section four examines liminal aspects of memory in Midnight’s Children , using the concept of liminality as a tool for literary analysis. The article ends with a brief conclusion and outlook. This contribution argues that liminality is an innovative concept in literary theory and literary memory studies. Liminality facilitates processual approaches and helps to avoid false certainties created by static concepts. Two different perspectives on liminality can be taken in literary memory studies: we can either study the mnemonic liminality of literature itself or the mnemonic liminality represented in literature. The ›fictional privileges‹ of literature in dealing with mnemonic liminality receive particular attention. Literature’s experientiality and its unique freedom in the depiction of consciousness allow fictional texts to portray the subjective experience of mnemonic liminality. Literature can represent mnemonic liminality in practically all of its aspects. Such representations concern, for instance, the multi-layered overlappings between memory and imagination, the complex interactions between the individual and collective levels of memory, the intricacies of communication and the crucial role of language and media in these processes. As a theoretical tool in literary memory studies, the concept of liminality enables us to identify and interpret the literary staging and reflection of these liminal aspects of memory as well as the narrative techniques involved. Although the variety of techniques is potentially unlimited, some devices seem especially effective. The analysis of Midnight’s Children shows that magic realism as well as metaphors and allegories are particularly powerful means of representing the liminality of memory. Furthermore, the narrator’s behavior plays a crucial role in the staging of mnemonic liminality. In the case of Midnight’s Children , the narrator’s partial unreliability as well as his numerous intertextual and intercultural references signify liminal aspects of his memory. The narrator crosses certain boundaries when his remembering self overlays his remembered self or when he oscillates between his first-person perspective and a miraculous omniscience that makes him appear to be the receptacle of other people’s memories. Moreover, structural means of representation such as leitmotifs and the semanticization of space and objects are forceful techniques to depict mnemonic liminality.

Open Access September 9, 2022

Inherited Revolution. Narratives in Transgenerational Memory Transfer

Ana de Almeida, Christian Wimplinger

Page range: 289-308

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Abstract

Our essay deals with narratives of social upheaval that act as vehicles for transgenerational memory transfer. We look at narratives of collectively experienced processes of emancipation and the subsequent possibility of remembering things not experienced firsthand under the prism of the political event of revolution understood as an inherently violent process (Arendt 1990). In this context, we inquire about postmemory along similar lines to those staked out by Marianne Hirsch, while also considering whether the term can be separated from trauma and linked to other emotional responses of comparable affective intensity. Memories of violence are frequently disjointed and impressionistic. The connection of fragments to a narrative context is often severed while the action of linking the threads into a coherent narrative faces vehement resistance. In principle, this is not different from the experience of violence in revolutions and their remembrance. However, narratives on revolution tend to exert a strong force of attraction upon their recipients. Considering the figures of cycle , linear progression , iteration , disruption and irreversibility as the time modes of revolution, we look at how these have enabled entirely new understandings of time since the nineteenth century. New forms of temporality, in turn, are entangled with the role displacement plays in the relationship between a transgenerational transfer of narratives and the construction of narrative time. In order to explore how a generation deals with the dominance (Hirsch 2012) of the narratives transmitted to them by the preceding one, we deal with two models in which affective states charged with both suffering and pleasure are developed into terms of cultural and literary theory: Bini Adamczak’s reading of desire as fetish in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, and Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia as an emotional disposition characteristic for modernity. Taking into account that both models are more or less constructed by cultural practices, historical events, and transformations in the history of ideas, and thus cannot always be precisely distinguished from one another, we present two main narrative strategies: The reception of the stories of one generation by another involves either contracting the affective intensity of their narratives at the expense of linear time or expanding narrative time far beyond individual life spans. For our analysis we mainly refer to Rodolfo Usigli’s Ensayo de un crimen and Heinrich Heine’s Ludwig Börne: A Memorial as post memory narratives on revolution. We understand them as examples of each narrative strategy and as part of the dialectic of this way of remembering.

Open Access September 9, 2022

Shared Histories in Multiethnic Societies: Literature as a Critical Corrective of Cultural Memory Studies

Monika Albrecht

Page range: 309-330

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Abstract

The staging of history in literature is engaged in dynamic exchange with society’s memory discourses and in this context, literature is generally seen as playing a creative role as a formative medium in memory cultures. For some time, however, many feel that established concepts of Cultural Memory Studies need to be reconsidered for multiethnic societies. The assumption is that official memory cultures tend to exclude people with a migrant background from identity-forming discourses about the past. Using Germany as an example, this paper argues, first, that the question of memory in multiethnic societies needs to be reconsidered indeed, but in a different direction than has been assumed so far, and, second, that much-discussed concepts such as the post-migrant paradigm or multidirectional memory tend to circumvent the problems at hand rather than contribute to their solution. The paper therefore discusses the preconditions for a literary-theoretical engagement with this socio-political issue and the direction in which an alternative conceptualization would have to go – that is, not a new theory or method, but a novel perspective that should be the basis for future theory building . Rather than confining the notion of a »shared history« to, either the common history of a country’s native population, or to the history since migration shared by minorities and receiving society, this paper proposes to focus on actual links between the histories of Germany as the receiving society and the histories of the new Germans’ countries of origin. Using literary texts and discussing a concrete example, it brings such shared histories to the fore and explores how they open up national memory discourses transnationall y. The underlying vision is that these important components of multiethnic societies have the potential to show a way in which national and transnational memory landscapes as a whole could be transformed. In this sense, the metaphor of »Migration into Other Pasts« may be rephrased as migration not »into the past of others« but a territorial move within one common shared history . The paper therefore shows that the prerequisites for a literary-theoretical examination of the question of memory culture in multiethnic societies and its literary representations must be sought in the offerings of literature itself. The literary example, Orkun Ertener’s novel Lebt (Alive/Live! 2014), with its numerous entangled and interweaving shared histories shows particularly clearly how literature can function as a drive or even theory generator for concepts to be developed – instead of, conversely, imposing readymade concepts on both German multiethnic societies and its literary production. The novel perspective of this paper can be summarized in the inversion of the conventional point of departure: Instead of looking for a way to include people with a migrant background into the German memory culture, the first question to be asked should be how, in the age of the general recognition of concepts of entangled history, the idea could arise and persist for so long that migrants with Turkish roots, for instance, have no relation to German history. By focusing on the historical connectivities between Germans and new Germans, Orkun Ertener’s novel Lebt chooses a different approach in this regard. It provides a transnational expansion of memory discourses on German, Greek, Jewish and Turkish/Ottoman history and thus opens up a new and long overdue memory space that is of central interest to multiethnic societies in Germany and beyond. As it seems, it takes writers who are more interested in entangled histories than in history as a resource for identity to get this right. Ertener undoubtedly belongs to this type of writers, as evidenced not least by the fact that he cites or refers to some of the most important historical studies for his context from Mark Mazower’s Salonica – City of Ghosts , a standard reference on the multiethnic and multicultural history of Thessaloniki, to Turkey, the Jews and the Holocaust by Corry Guttstadt who challenged the myth of a Jewish-friendly policy in Turkey. Ertener’s novel Lebt is saturated with the interconnected histories of various ethnic groups and may therefore serve as a blueprint for a vision of memory culture in a multiethnic society . In conclusion, the essay outlines that developing an alternative concept of memory and historical consciousness in multiethnic societies and their literary representations cannot be based on much-discussed concepts such as post-migration or multidirectional memory. Although a superficial glance suggests that they might be the obvious choice for the topic of this paper, a novel take on multiethnic memory landscapes must start from specific shared histories and their entanglements. The paper therefore proposes that a bottom-up development of theoretical-methodological work is necessary in the case of representations of memory in multiethnic societies. This approach must highlight how links between the histories of the receiving societies and the histories of the migrants’ countries of origin are, or could become, important components of an alternative memory culture in multiethnic landscapes – and that these links hold the potential for transforming national and transnational memory landscapes as a whole.

Articles

Open Access September 9, 2022

Defining Migration Writing

Joanna Kosmalska

Page range: 331-350

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Abstract

With a view to extending and enriching the vibrant, ongoing debate about migration and literature, this article makes an attempt to define »migration writing«. Using three perspectives – the theme-oriented , ethnic-oriented and text-oriented approaches – the paper examines the concept of »migration writing« in relation to other literary terms. Therefore, the starting point for the discussion is a brief comparison of migration writing with autobiography, travel writing and postcolonial literature. Then some useful comparisons are made to other related literary concepts, such as exile literature, refugee literature, foreigners’ literature, guest worker literature, Kanake literature, »allochthonous« literature, ethnic literature, minority literature, diasporic literature, hyphenated literature, multicultural literature, intercultural literature, émigré literature/emigrant literature, immigrant literature, migrant literature, the literature of migration. From these concepts, there emanates what I call »migration writing«. The label is used by me as a term for a whole variety of different types of literary and non-literary texts that have been published since the 1990s. These texts either tackle the topic of migration or emerge from the experience of migration (but not necessarily address the subject of migration). It is also not necessary for the author to be a migrant: it is enough that his or her work is inspired or influenced by the experience of migration and is imbued with a vision of cosmopolitan, transnational, hybrid society and the globalised world. Given the large scope of this definition, it seems best to define the genre as a constellation of many different types of text which are connected to one another by a set of characteristic features. Some of these features include: the real-life nature of the writing, creolization and multilingualism in the text, references to multiple cultures and/or geographic locations, impact of the Internet and online communication on the structure of the work, common themes and motifs. The article ends by illuminating the research potential of migration writing. Among other things, it gives highly informative accounts of migration experience, exposes the stereotypical representations of migrants, gives piercing insights into migrants’ host and home cultures, explores the issues of identity, nationality, borders and belonging, provides alternative knowledge about current social and cultural transformations. Acting as a counterweight to the dominant narratives, migration texts often make visible the phenomena that are unintentionally ignored or wilfully excluded from the mainstream public discourse. Consequently, they provide alternative knowledge that can be a useful research material in all kinds of areas, such as sociological, political, economic or culture studies.

Open Access September 9, 2022

Lyric Poetry and the Disorientation of Empathy

Wit Pietrzak

Page range: 351-369

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Abstract

In the present essay, I argue that empathy constitutes the mode in which lyric poetry registers in the readers. However, unlike in prose, where the reader is allowed to empathize with the characters via the mediation of the narrator, in poetry, as Jonathan Culler and a number of other theoreticians of the lyric have indicated, the reader assumes the position of the speaker, thus becoming a re performer of the text. This positioning, in turn, creates a situation in which the text, rather than representing a mental state, embodies it and in the process of being enacted impels the reader to internalize this state. I then move on to complement this distinction between poetry and prose by noting the fact that critics who explore how empathy is employed in reading fiction appear to depart from assumptions of comprehensibility and stability of the representations of characters’ mental states. This is shown in the analysis of the work of such critics as Suzanne Keen and Liza Zunshine. By contrast, in lyric poetry, empathy is both necessitated and simultaneously disoriented through the discontinuous, open-ended nature of the poetic text. As a result, the reader is perpetually made to feel into the speaker’s evocations of mental states but his or her empathic efforts are thwarted by the operations of the text in which a given affect is being evoked and disarticulated at the same time. This dialectic of empathy and disorientation is a dynamic process that can take various forms. In the last section of the present essay, I analyze three poems, »Punishment« by Seamus Heaney, »The Loaf« by Paul Muldoon and »Geis« by Caitríona O’Reilly, in order to show how the empathic impulse is both triggered and disoriented by the tensions between the poems’ denotative meanings and their formal features, mainly prosody and rhyme scheme. Thus, a tentative conclusion is that lyric poetry’s formal complexity and its non-mimetic nature enter into a dynamic relationship with the propositional content – a dynamic which contributes to the continual disorientation of our empathic capacity that is the essential form of our performance of the poetic text. This tension may manifest itself in how form and content challenge each other or how they cooperate, which in either case leaves us with a rather uncomfortable feeling of having witnessed not a representation of but an embodied, real-time moment of intimate and essentially aporetic experiential performance.

About this journal

The Journal of Literary Theory is an international forum for debate in literary theory. JLT takes an interdisciplinary approach and is open to a broad variety of theories and methods, promoting their study, research, and development.

JLT reflects the diversity of approaches put forward in literary theory. It is meant to be a platform for controversial debate and dialogue. It reaches out to disciplines dealing with theoretical foundations of the study of literature as well as to related fields of research such as musicology, art theory, and film studies as well as the sciences.

Above all, the journal aims to publish work on fundamental issues in methodology and the construction of theories and concepts, as well as articles on particular literary theories. Historical case studies are accepted only if they adopt a predominantly systematic perspective, contribute to the reconstruction of the history of literary theory, or pursue innovative methods. While most issues of the print version concentrate on a special theme, independent articles are also welcome. Moreover, JLT contains work reviewing and outlining trends of theoretical debates in literary theory and related disciplines.

The print version of the Journal of Literary Theory is published twice a year; each issue contains contributions in both German and English. All articles will be accompanied by an English abstract of about two pages. Submissions are selected in a blind review process and accepted for publication by an international advisory board.

The journal is accompanied by a website (www.JLTonline.de) where reviews, conference reports and calls for papers will be offered.

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