(Re)writing and Remembering: Memory as Artefact and Artifice

(Re)writing and Remembering: Memory as Artefact and Artifice
ISBN-10
1443888702
ISBN-13
9781443888707
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
175
Language
English
Published
2016-02-08
Publisher
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Authors
Jonathan Fruoco, James Dalrymple, Virginia Sherman

Description

Recounting past events is intrinsic to the storytelling function, as most fiction assumes the past tense as the natural means of narrating a story. Few narratives draw attention to this process, yet others make the act of remembering a primary part of the narrative situation. Ranging in its focus from poetry to novels, autobiographical memoirs and biopics – from the ostensibly fictional to the implicitly real – this volume discusses the extent to which such fictional acts of remembering are also acts of rewriting the past to suit the needs of the present. How seamlessly does experience yield to the ordering strictures of narrative and what is at stake in the process? What must be omitted or stylised, and to what (ideological) end? In making an artefact of the past, what role does artifice play, and what does this process also tell us about history-making?

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