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
Category: 18. 1/2 Public Memory II
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