Poetry and precarious memory: Ways of understanding less and less (original) (raw)
Related papers
Interpretation of Memories: Literary, Psychological, Cultural and Historical Aspects, 2017
Memory is that which we remember; it is also that which we forget. Memory is like a sieve through which the mind constantly selects, appropriates and organizes what is, collectively, called our consciousness. It is again memory which associates the concrete with the abstract, the phenomenal world with the world of dreams, and even that of myths and legends, often triggered by whiffs, colours and images. In many ways, memory endorses the activity of our minds and, nebulous, abstract and fleeting as that is, it yet shapes our reality and forms our identity. Memory has had interesting presences across disciplines, ranging from the pathological and clinical to the poetical. It is perhaps in the identity and exploration of the self that memory, or even the lack of it, find its maximum presence in literature. Art itself, in many ways, is a recollection of many things. Borrowing the literary turn from Keats, it seems appropriate to study the proximity of memory to poetry in its many patterns and images, in the mesh and web of coherence and incoherence. This paper hopes to analyse the myriad processes in which the mind works, creating in the process what constitutes memory, and in turn seeks to study its patterns, which are poetical, to say the least. The paper thus seeks to look into the principles of 'poetry' as a genre integrating art with the mind, and with consciousness itself. The paper also promises to make use of representative poetry, as illustrations to the workings of the mind and how art emblematises memory in its many creative manifestations.
The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret's Institute, 2021
The habitual union of memory and history is being replaced in our time by a deep rift between them, in which both sides change their very essence. Memory becomes a rift in the very ideology of history. The author surveys various possibilities of memory as an act performed by the remembering subject (“performative act”), not so much in relation to his or her individual past as in relation to a common present. The author looks at memory as the practice of subjectivity, i. e. only in one of the modes of its existence. The exercise of memory as a practice of subjectivity brings together different types of memory, whether they are personal or transpersonal. The issue in question is what happens with the subject of commemoration, himself. This article looks at three types of memory and remembrance. Psychological memory demonstrates the fragmentation and lack of self-sufficiency of human experience of “the self”, and the fundamental lack of integrity of this experience, which turns into need and deficiency. Ideological memory presupposes that the past “belongs” to a subject which is forging and finalizing history (for instance, the state) — to one who holds the exclusive right to “tell history’s story”. The third type of memory might be called performative: it assumes not the ability to recall, but the establishment of relationship with those who are present even in their absence. At its centre is the restoration of memory as an act and event in which a radical, transhistorical experience can take place. This act establishes a community of the living with the dead; this community has a paradoxical, temporal nature.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2019
In this paper, I pose the question of how a traumatic past may be represented through a strategy of intergenerational, interpsychic displacement. I present the case of one reader who uses poetry and art to respond to a difficult text: Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories. In my examination of this reader’s encounter with difficult knowledge, I turn to Bion’s concept of the caesura as a means of investigating between affect and representation, memory and its screen, self and other, past and present, revelation and concealment.
‘Bad influence’ and ‘willful subjects’: the gender politics of The Life of Poetry
Textual Practice
In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser writes that the resistance to poetry comes not just from its being viewed as 'intellectual and obscure and confused' but also because it is considered 'sexually suspect.' In bringing together these questions about gender and genre from the outset, it is clear that one of Rukeyser's central projects in the text is to unveil and confront the gender norms of Cold-War containment culture, norms that positioned the queer body and the communist body as dangerous, the male body as antagonistic to the female body, and that underscored the policing of literary and disciplinary categories. The gender politics of the text, however, only become fully legible when read along with 'The Usable Truth'-the lectures delivered through the 1940s that would become the 1949 book-and in context of her unpublished essay about women poets, Many Keys-commissioned but rejected by The Nation in the 1957-that expands on underdeveloped ideas in The Life of Poetry. While Rukeyser was deeply engaged in thinking about the place of the woman writer, this essay considers the repressive conditions that contributed to the absence of an overt gender analysis in the final version of The Life of Poetry, while exploring Rukeyser's wilful persistence in pursing radical textual and sexual theories of multiplicity.