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Reviewed by:
  • Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting
  • Laura E. Savu
Liedeke Plate . Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting. Palgrave: Macmillan, 2011. xi + 239 pp.

Plate's elegantly written book focuses on contemporary women's rewritings from the 1970s onwards as complex interventions in cultural memory that seek to "re-member the past differently" (3) even though they no longer partake of a movement intent on social change. Alert to contemporary culture's obsession with and commoditization of the past, Plate sees rewriting as "one of our culture's central technologies of memory" (5) through which the past is revisited and revised to shape identity in the present as well as project new futures. Plate's argument is firmly grounded in a wide range of texts—English, European, and North American—and contexts—from feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, to the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, consumer culture, "liquid modernity" (Zygmunt Bauman's term for the moment of neoliberal capitalism), and last but not least, the new memory discourses as theorized by Andreas Huyssen and Pierre Nora. In particular, she emphasizes the heuristic value of Nora's concept of "milieu de mémoire" for understanding the "liquid" time of simultaneity, as opposed to the linear unfolding of time within modernity, and though she finds its narrative equivalent in myth, she also emphasizes the latter's impetus for "renewal, resistance, and transformation" (32). Not only does the book make important distinctions like this—and, relatedly, between women's rewritings of the 1970s (referred to as "feminist revision") and contemporary rewritings (called "mythical retellings")—but it also highlights some interesting paradoxes that inform the practice of rewriting and its relationship to cultural memory. The latter emerges as "a dynamic process of amnesia and anamnesis, of forgetting, recovery, and reconstruction" (31).

For one thing, as Plate points out in the introduction and elaborates in the last chapter, if "feminist re-vision" is driven by suspicion, aiming to demythologize what it rewrites, to undo the hegemonic and authoritative version of History (and his story), contemporary women's rewritings tap into myth's "radical potential for open-endedness" (31). At the same time, however, Plate [End Page 407] devotes the first two chapters to showing that the success of women's rewriting in the literary marketplace indicates that it has been co-opted by capitalism, therefore losing much of its subversive edge and critical effectiveness. This is partly due to the fragmentation of History into a plurality of histories and "herstories," which has contributed to the social fragmentation of culture into subcultures forming niche markets (65); hence the author's interest in recuperating second-wave feminism's emancipatory promise, starting from and building on two influential concepts—Adrienne Rich's "re-vision" and Hélène Cixous's "écriture feminine"—that render women's rewriting a form of "productive reception" (54). The second chapter further explores the role women's rewriting has played in "the production of the past as presence" (a phrase she borrows from the German philologist Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht) through its manufacturing of narratives about the past that become caught in an ever-renewing cycle of newness and the dynamics of consumer culture (16). With the rise of what Bauman terms the "supermarket of identities," the political and ideological aims of feminist re-vision are now realized in a "commercially viable form" based on the symbolic capital attached to the canonical names invoked by the rewriting, as when Emma Tennant's Adèle (2003) is subtitled Jane Eyre's Hidden Story.

Next, Plate calls attention to the paradox suggested by the metaphor of writing as stealing—"stealing" as integral to the creative process yet also immoral and punishable by law (68)—in order to examine the issues of property and legitimacy raised by women's rewriting. Focusing on two recent cases of alleged plagiarism, Pia Pera's Lo Diary (1995) and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone (2001), she argues that the reception of these texts as "derivative" and of their authors as literary upstarts reveals the contending forces (economic, artistic, political, and ideological) that shape cultural memory (67). Yet another paradox of (re)writing is captured in...

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