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

ecome objects of remembrance’. 54 ‘Collective texts’, by contrast, can be
understood as a ‘circulation medium that disseminates and shapes cultural
memory’. 55 Popular fiction, for example, which is widely read but may not continue
to be preserved across multiple generations, can nonetheless create
representations of the past which contribute to collective memory. 56 Studying
literary texts as ‘collective texts’ also involves assessing how such portrayals
respond and contribute to ‘current memory-debates’. 57 The memory cultures
surrounding the production and reception of a text are, therefore, a significant
consideration.
44
It should be emphasized that a narrative, wherever it might lie on the scale
between high literature and mass, popular entertainment, need not be
autobiographical or factually accurate in order to affect memory cultures; what
matters is whether readers ‘ascribe [...] some kind of referentiality’ to the text. 58
Erll observes that the ‘ontological gap between fiction and reality postulated in
theory is smoothly overcome in practice, and that literary works clearly shape our
ideas about past realities’. 59 In my own research, analysis of readers’ reviews
demonstrates that several of the texts studied, including those which are fictional
or contain elements of fictionalization, are received as authentic depictions of the
past with direct relevance to readers’ own memories. 60 It is not the case, however,
that readers believe that the events related in fictional texts happened in reality,
rather that they interpret a fictional text as an authentic (but not necessarily
factually accurate) version of the past if it ‘resonates’ with existing ideas about that
past circulating within cultural memory. 61 Texts which use fictionalizing narrative
54
Erll, ‘Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, p. 390.
55
Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 164.
56
Erll, ‘Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, p. 389–90.
57
Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 168.
58
Ibid., p. 164.
59
Ibid., p. 165.
60
See, for example, readers’ responses to Wenn ich groß bin, flieg ich zu den Sternen and
Detstvo Levy in Chapter 4.
61
Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 165. See also Erll, ‘Literature, Film, and the Mediality of
Cultural Memory’, p. 389.