Remembering the Socialist Past - Bad request! - University of Exeter

overview will form the basis for the main focus of interest: the relationship between
literature and memory. The discussion will include consideration of those concepts
most relevant to the methodology I have used in this thesis: how memory is
conveyed in literary texts, how texts can not only represent but also produce
memories and how literature can play an active role in the process of collective
remembrance. The final part of this chapter will briefly consider some critical
studies on the representation of children and childhood memories in literature in
order to explore the significance and potential effects of representing a past era
through narratives of childhood experience.
Theories of Collective and Cultural Memory
There is no single definition of ‘cultural memory’, in part because the field of
memory studies is highly interdisciplinary and still relatively new, but also because
the complex nature of remembrance does not lend itself to precise categorization.
In her introduction to Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook, a wide-ranging collection of articles which sets out to
provide the theoretical frameworks and ideas for memory work across a range of
disciplines, Astrid Erll draws attention to the indistinct nature of the concept of
cultural memory:
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‘Cultural’ (or, if you will, ‘collective’, ‘social’) memory is certainly a
multifarious notion, a term often used in an ambiguous and vague way.
Media, practices, and structures as diverse as myth, monuments,
historiography, ritual, conversational remembering, configurations of cultural
knowledge, and neuronal networks are nowadays subsumed under this wide
umbrella term. 2
Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2010).
2 Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An
International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B.
Young (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 1–15 (p. 1).