Literature is a medium which exerts considerable influence in cultures of memory. As ‘collective texts’ literary works can shape individual and collective memory. The forms and social functions of such ‘memoryficational’ narratives are studied from a historicocultural and comparative perspective, by drawing on the paradigmatical case of the socalled War Fiction Boom: towards the end… Continue reading Astrid Erll | Reading Literature as Collective Texts: German and English War Novels of the 1920s as Media of Cultural and Communicative Memory
Month: October 2014
Margriet van der Waal | “We Can Only Remind Each Other of It”| The farm as South African ‘lieu de mémoire’ in the process of building a national collective memory
Abstract The portrayal of the farm in South African (literary) writing plays an important role as ‘lieu de mémoire’. The dramatic political changes of the early 1990s have made the development of a collective memory in South Africa a pressing issue, and this article explores how two recent texts deal with the notion of power… Continue reading Margriet van der Waal | “We Can Only Remind Each Other of It”| The farm as South African ‘lieu de mémoire’ in the process of building a national collective memory
Thijs Vleugel | Meaning Irony: The Ethics of Irony
Abstract In the second of this twopart article , the phenomenon of irony and the 1 processes through which it generates meaning will be approached from a perspective that shows how irony not only happens through the semantic interplay between what is “said” and what remains “unsaid”, but also through the ethical interplay between writer,… Continue reading Thijs Vleugel | Meaning Irony: The Ethics of Irony
Martha C. Nussbaum | Literature and Ethical Theory: Allies or Adversaries?
Abstract In this article Martha Nussbaum examines the problematic relationship between literature and ethical theory. Inspired by reaction against the ascendancy of reductive theory, especially normative theory deriving from economics, she shows that literature is more than a handmaid of ethical theory, claiming that novels not simply represent ethical deliberation, but incite it. Nussbaum wishes… Continue reading Martha C. Nussbaum | Literature and Ethical Theory: Allies or Adversaries?