P. Collier et alii (dir.), Anamnesia. Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture

Anamnesia. Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture

Sous la direction de Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner et Olga Smith

Oxford : Peter Lang, coll. "Modern French Identities", 2009.

EAN 9783039118465

359 p.

Prix 50EUR

Présentation de l'édition :

Memory has always been crucial to French literature and culture as a means of mediating the relationship between perception and knowledge of the individual coming to terms with his identity in time. Relatively recently, memory has also emerged as the key force in the creation of a collective consciousness in the wider perspective of French cultural history. This collection of essays, selected from the proceedings of a seminar on 'Memory' given by Dr Emma Wilson at the University of Cambridge, offers a fresh evaluation of memory as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon in modern and contemporary French culture, including literature, cinema and the visual arts. 'Anamnesia', the book's title, develops the Aristotelian concept of anamnesis: recollection as a dynamic and creative process, which includes forgetting as much as remembering, concealment as much as imagination. Memory in this extremely diverse range of essays is therefore far from being presented as a straightforward process of recalling the past, but emerges as the site of research and renegotiation, of contradictions and even aporia.

Contents :

Emma Wilson: Preface

Peter Collier/Anna Magdalena Elsner/Olga Smith: Introduction

Max Silverman: Trips, Tropes and Traces: Reflections on Memory in French and Francophone Culture

Ian James: Death, Memory, Subjectivity: Perec's W, ou le souvenir d'enfance

Anna Magdalena Elsner: 'L'obscénité absolue du projet de comprendre': The Communicability of Traumatic Knowledge in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

Myriem El Maïzi: Marguerite Duras' Poetics of Diversion: Memory, Forgetting and Invention

Jenny Murray: 'La mort inachevée': Writing, Remembering, and Forgetting in Assia Djebar's Le Blanc de l'Algérie, La Disparition de la langue française and Nulle part dans la maison de mon père

Patrick O'Donovan: Memory as Object: A Relation of Proximity?

Catherine Crimp: Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett: Space and the Materials of Memory

Olga Smith: 'A Hollow Image of the Person': Objects of Memory in the Art of Christian Boltanski

Ferzina Banaji: Rethinking Memory: The Violation of a 'lieu de mémoire' in Marcel Ophüls' Le Chagrin et la pitié

Jennifer Burris: A Landscape of Amnesia: The Loss and Attempted Reconstruction of Memory in Artistic Representations of the Urban

Rositza Alexandrova: Things of Art: A Photographic Thumbing of the Nose

Katja Haustein: 'La vie comme oeuvre': Barthes with Proust

Michèle Lester: Through the Looking Glass: Beckett's Monologues, Jacques Lacan and the Role of Memory

Roger Cardinal: Joë Bousquet: Remembering a Wound

Thanh-Vân Ton-That: Anna Moï's Riz Noir: A Feminine View of War, between Two Cultures

Amaleena Damlé: Phantasmal Relics: Psychoanalytical and Deconstructive Ghosts in Moi L'Interdite and Pagli by Ananda Devi

Jenny Chamarette: Memory, Representation of Time and Cinema

Nadine Boljkovac: Intimacy and Prophecy: Marker and Resnais's Memories

Richard Armstrong: '«Nevers» ... is just a word like any other': The Failure of Words and the Wandering Woman in Hiroshima mon amour

Isabelle McNeill: Agnès Varda's Moving Museums

Carol Mavor: A is for Alice, for Amnesia, for Anamnesis: A Fairy Tale called La Jetée.

The Editors :

Peter Collier is Emeritus Fellow in French at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. His books include Proust and Venice (1989). He has translated Zola's Germinal (1994) and Proust's The Fugitive (2002). He is the series editor of Modern French Identities and European Connections for Peter Lang.
Anna Magdalena Elsner is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge and currently a visiting researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She is writing on the relation between mourning and creativity in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Apart from everything Proustian, she is also interested in French documentary cinema.
Olga Smith is preparing her Ph.D. thesis, entitled 'The Erosion of the Real: Photography in France 1970s-2000s' at the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.