Literature Through Recall: Ways of Connecting Literary Studies and Memory Studies

The Two Areas of Study

Literary studies and memory studies have in common that the main objects of their interest, literature and memory, may be broken down into heuristic triads: author/text/reader and encoding/storing/retrieval, respectively. The two triads may be compared historically and even blended metaphorically, the latter being a procedure present in most human discourses, including science (see Turner 2002; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). The metaphorical blend of memory with literature, where memorizing is the source domain and writing is the target domain, has been indirectly present in Western thought since Plato’s wax tablet (see Draaisma 2001), influencing the way memory is conceptualized and explained. The opposite blend, where writing is the source domain and memorizing is the target domain, would conceptualize the writer as the encoder of meaning that is stored in a text and later recalled by a reader.¹

The second metaphor has not been used nearly as widely as the first one, and the most obvious reason for that would be that the metaphor applies fully only to the writer who remembers the text that he or she had written, which limits the usefulness of the metaphor. But the primacy of the author as the most privileged interpreter of the text has been disputed for a long time in literary theory, at least since Wimsatt and Beardsley (1998 [1954]) succinctly labeled the phenomenon “intentional fallacy.” Furthermore, different interpretations of any literary text make it a reconstructive effort towards meaning constructed by various readers (the common wisdom of literary criticism is that there are as many interpretations as there are readers), among whom the writer is no exception even though he or she is aware of the intended meaning of the text. This is similar to the way in which memory is generally accepted to be a process of restructuring data in the brain, rather than just gaining access to it unambiguously. The restructuring goes on in the mind of experts (writers) and the nonexperts (the majority of readers) alike, although there are large differences between the two groups (see Graves 1996, 396–400). Finally, in all cultures that possess either oral or written literature, some literary texts gain special importance—canonicity—which makes them worthwhile to create, reproduce, and remember in a given culture in much the same way as an individual keeps track of memories that he or she deems important.² This goes to show how analyzing memories of literary works can be useful in bringing together various types of knowledge gathered by memory studies and literary studies.

The conceptual similarity of the disciplines that investigate how literature and memories are formed, how they function, and how they manifest themselves enables the researcher to transfer knowledge that is pertinent in one area of study to the other and vice versa. Roediger and Wertsch maintain that literary scholars can make use of memory research to assist them with their own topics of interest, such as autobiography, schematic narratives, or the way in which novelists use personal memory in shaping their characters (2008, 12–13). Other points of interest may be added as well, such as the influence of the “art of memory” (ars memoriae) on the formation of literary genres (Yates 2001; Carruthers 1990), using memory as a template for understanding intertextuality (Lachmann 1997), the relation of “cultural memory” to literary canons (Assmann 2005), and so forth.

It is obvious that these various approaches build on different insights, mainly from philosophy and history, to create a theoretical framework of memory that enables the scholars to focus on their topic of interest. But as Wertsch (2002; also Roediger and Wertsch 2008) points out, one should be wary of the danger of uncritically appropriating terms from the study of individual memory. If those terms are used in a broadly metaphorical way without an awareness of the concrete processes they refer to, they may become too vague and lose much of their interpretative value. While such a procedure of metaphorical appropriation is common in the humanities (as shown in the beginning of this article), it is...