The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film

The Memory Effect is a collection of essays on the status of memory—individual and collective, cultural and transcultural—in contemporary literature, film, and other visual media. Contributors look at memory’s representation, adaptation, translation, and appropriation, as well as its mediation and remediation. Memory’s irreducibly constructed nature is explored, even as its status is reaffirmed as the basis of both individual and collective identity.

The book begins with an overview of the field, with an emphasis on the question of subjectivity. Under the section title Memory Studies: Theories, Changes, and Challenges, these chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the volume. Section 2, Literature and the Power of Cultural Memory/Memorializing, focuses on the relation between literature and cultural memory. Section 3, Recuperating Lives: Memory and Life Writing, shifts the focus from literature to autobiography and life writing, especially those lives shaped by trauma and forgotten by history. Section 4, Cinematic Remediations: Memory and History, examines specific films in an effort to account for cinema’s intimate and mutually constitutive relationship with memory and history. The final section, Multi-Media Interventions: Television, Video, and Collective Memory, considers individual and collective memory in the context of contemporary visual texts, at the crossroads of popular and avant-garde cultures.

1
Developments in Memory Studies and Twentieth- and Twenty-first-Century Literature and Film
Russell Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty
Kilbourn and Ty provide a survey of the major developments in theories of memory in modernity, including Proust’s notion of involuntary memory, Bergson’s distinction between instinctual and attentive recollection, Freud’s assumptions about memory in notions such as repression, neurosis, and trauma, Halbwachs’s collective memory, Caruth’s trauma theory, and van Dijck’s model of memory as intersubjective, dialogical, social exchange. The last third of the chapter provides a brief outline of each chapter in the book.2
“Joy in Repetition” or The Significance of Seriality in Processes of Memory and (Re)Mediation
Sabine Sielke
Sielke bridges the gap between cultural studies and the cognitive sciences by reconceptualizing memory and mediation as seriality. She looks at the effects of remediation through technologies of reproduction—film, TV, and new media—in the works of Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein.3
Hirsch, Sebald, and the Virtues and Limits of Postmemory
Kathy Behrendt
Behrendt uses the example of W.G. Sebald to point out some of the ethical dangers and limitations of Hirsch’s theory of postmemory. She urges us to re-examine the central role of the witness, of testimony, and the value of historical accuracy.4
British Propaganda and the Construction of Female Mourning in World War I
Sarah Henstra
Henstra examines women’s writing during the First World War against the backdrop of patriotic discourses that encouraged maternal sacrifice and heroism. Henstra’s research recovers dimensions of public memory and remembrance practices that have gone unrecognized in traditional narratives of the Great War.5
Rhetorical Metatarsals: Bone Memory in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries
Tanis MacDonald
MacDonald argues that poetry, the “least commoditized art,” can challenge public forgetting and, at the same time, articulate the pain of colonial history experienced by African diasporic people. She looks at the ways gaps in kinship and family narratives can be partially resolved with the help of art, especially by moving lyric and political poetry such as Brand’s.6
Mediation and Remediation in Carlos Fuentes’s The Old Gringo
John Dean
For Dean, the remediation of memory not only shapes early twentieth-century politics and creates official history, but also contributes to constructions of Self and Other that characterize the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Dean’s essay insightfully reads Fuentes’ use of the tropes of seeing and mirrors to demonstrate the way official history can be re-envisioned.7
Following Hermine: Resisting Remembering
Marlene Kadar
Kadar records her extraordinary journey of tracking the life of a former concentration camp guard “whose story is constructed from a/b fragments, news media sources and, more recently, historical and legal documentation.” Kadar’s essay wants us to “trouble the contradictions” in our remembrance of someone with an unsavoury life, but whose life still is a human one.8
“In Auschwitz there is a Great House”: The Location of Memory and Identity in the Roma Porrajmos [Devouring] or Holocaust
Sheelagh Russell-Brown
Russell-Brown explores the “rememory” of Roma or Gypsy people who lost their lives under the Nazis. She looks at the ways Romany activists are beginning to reshape their memory and identity politics by writing autobiographies and by performing their songs.9
Autobiography and the Validation of Memory in Neil Gunns’s Atom of Delight
Kenneth James Keir
Keir argues that “autobiography, more than any other literary genre, raises problems regarding the function of memory in literature, and the status we assign to memory in a text.” Using Scottish writer Neil Gunn’s fictional autobiography as a case study, Keir addresses a number of textual issues about self-memorialization and fiction and the porous boundary between history and art.10
La Jetée and 12 Monkeys: Memory and History at Odds
Amresh Sinha
Sinha explores the intriguing links among time, repetition, and memory in Chris Marker’s 1962 short film, consisting mainly of photographic stills, and in Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film, which was inspired by Marker’s. The essay adroitly compares the two films, using insights from Benjamin’s theses of history, Barthes’ theories of the photograph, and trauma theory to discuss voluntary and involuntary memory, and to engage with the difficult question of how filmic texts translate the differences between memory and history.11
Traces of a Half-Remembered Dream: Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) and Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2004) and the Memory Film
Ander Bergstrom
Bergstrom argues that “by visualizing philosophies of memory on the screen," these films demonstrate the manner in which “cinema has shaped and continues to shape our conception of how memory operates.” He points out that the difference between the genres of the two films, Nolan’s as a popular action and heist film and Wong’s as a transnational art film, accounts for the differences in their treatment of time and space, dream and memory.12
“You Must Remember This...”: Marc Augé and Casablanca
Graeme Gilloch
Gilloch looks at French anthropologist Marc Augé’s Casablanca (2007, translated in 2009 as Casablanca: Movies and Memory), exploring Augé’s concern with the relationship between cinema and memory. Gilloch reads the film as a melodrama of remembering and forgetting, focusing on the use of music, the flashback, self-sacrificial love, and the intertextual link to Goethe’s novella, Die Wahlverwandtschaften.13
The Cinema of Simulation: Hyper-Histories and (Un)Popular Memory in The Good German (2006) and Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Stefan Sereda
Sereda looks at “a genre of films that intentionally favours an understanding of history as always-already mediated and therefore malleable.” Films like Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds blend historical footage with fiction, presenting “hyper-histories that combine historical records with dramatization, fabrications, and media artefacts from and about the periods being depicted,” in order to establish political commentary that can challenge or reinforce hegemonic political discourses in the contemporary moment.14
The Heritage Minutes and Canadian Collective Memory: Nostalgia, Nationalism, and Cultural Memory
Erin Peters
Peters studies The Heritage Minutes, a series of short advertisements that dramatized episodes in Canadian history to enhance Canadians’ understanding of history and to reinforce Canadian identity. She notes that in attempting to build a collective national memory, the Minutes became “pieces of Canadian cultural memory themselves.”15
Disaster and Trauma in Rescue Me, Saving Grace, and Treme: Commercial Television’s Contributions to Ideas about Memorials
John McCullough
McCullough looks at three television series that deal with the aftermath of three recent events in the U.S., each of which killed many people and was highly mediated: the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995; the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001; and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. McCullough notes that the series have the common goal of memorializing through a broad range of aesthetic strategies typically associated with serial television form and “quality TV.”16
Creative Re-enactment in the Films and Videos of Omer Fast
Kate Warren
Warren considers the cultural and historical phenomenon of re-enactment, its defining characteristics, and its role in the remediation of cultural memory using the gallery-based installations of Israeli-born artist Omer Fast. Fast is drawn to “those whose memories, experiences, and personal narratives have been contested and compromised by processes of representation and remediation.”