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

‘literature as a medium of collective memory’ are most relevant. The following
discussion will therefore consider approaches to studying both the representation
and creation of memory within literary texts. I will include consideration of how
texts can influence both the memories of individuals and the collective memories of
a group. In the final part of this section I will outline Erll’s criteria for considering
whether a text is likely to have an effect on collective memory.
40
Literary texts are particularly suited to representing how individuals
remember. 38 Many forms of both memory and literature rely on constructing a
narrative of past events in a way which is meaningful in the present moment of
remembering/narration:
[T]he narrative distinction between an experiencing and a narrating “I”
already rests on a (largely implicit) concept of memory: namely, on the
concept of a difference between pre-narrative experience on the one hand,
and on the other hand a memory which forms the past through narrative
and retrospectively creates meaning. The occupation with first-person
narrators is thus always an occupation with the literary representation of
memory. 39
In addition to the individual memory processes of a narrator, literary texts may also
depict cultural practices of remembrance within a particular society or group. The
term ‘fictions of memory’ has been proposed by Nünning and Birgit Neumann as a
generic category for texts which represent processes of remembering. 40 This term
can apply not only to fictional texts which foreground issues of individual
remembering, but also to texts concerned with identity and the past, that is: ‘the
38
Erll and Nünning, ‘Where Literature and Memory Meet’, p. 282.
39
Ibid.
40
Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representation of Memory’ in Cultural Memory Studies: An
International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, pp. 333–343 (p. 334). She refers to Fictions of
Memory, ed. by Ansgar Nünning, special issue of Journal for the Study of British Cultures
10.1 (2003).