On Memory, Forgetting and Dorothy Richardson - A Theoretical Companion Piece to Richard Ekins, 'Dilemmas of Placing and Dating in Blue Plaque Research: The Case of Dorothy Richardson in Bloomsbury (1896-1907) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
The main activity of the Dorothy Richardson Society is its biennial conference. The comparable 2015 event, however, held at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies in Senate House on 15 May 2015 was billed as a centenary event. It was marked by two special features. The event commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the publication of Pointed Roofs, the first chapter-volume of Dorothy Richardson’s 2,262 page novel cycle Pilgrimage. Second, the day was marked by the unveiling of the first blue plaque celebrating Richardson’s life and work. The placement of the plaque – on Richardson’s former residence at 2 Woburn Buildings (now 6 Woburn Walk), Bloomsbury, London, on 12 May 2015, and its formal unveiling on 15 May – was the high point of variously intense periods of collaboration between a number of principal players in their roles as members of the Dorothy Richardson Society and of Bloomsbury’s Marchmont Association (MA). It is the purpose of this article to detail th...
The Life of Forgetting in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature
Caliban, 2018
The essays included in this issue were originally presented at two conferences organised in March 2017 and May 2018 by the research centre Cultures anglo-saxonnes, University Toulouse - Jean Jaurès. The authors seek to delineate an ars oblivionis in 20th- and 21stcentury British literature, a poetics of forgetting in which oblivion’s ghostly remains make for emancipatory swerves from the past and for the advent of new narrative configurations. After Ricœur and Augé among others, remembering and forgetting are not envisaged as opposites but as a collaborative pair, with forgetting as the condition of memory (Ricœur) or as the lifeblood of memory (Augé). Working on the productive interplay of memory and forgetting, the articles investigate what Derrida calls « the life of forgetting », the living appropriation of forgotten presences acknowledged as loss and yet made to survive, to endure, in renewed and transfigured presences. Thus, forgetting is not only the condition of memory ; it is also the condition of creativity and storytelling.
Portable monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans
Poetics Today (2004)
This article seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions on the workings of cultural memory and examines in particular the way in which literary texts can function as a social framework for memory. Through a detailed study of the genesis, composition, and long-term reception of Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (1982 [1818]), I argue that literary texts play a variety of roles in the formation of cultural memory and that these roles are linked to their status as public discourse, to their fictional and poetical qualities, and to their longevity. This analysis of the multiple roles of literary texts in what I call ''memorial dynamics'' sheds light on the complex communicative processes by which images of the past are formed and transformed over time. It indicates the need to consider discontinuity as a feature of memorial dynamics and to recognize, for better or for worse, that fictionality and poeticity are an integral and not merely ''inauthentic'' feature of cultural memory.
Addressed to the Nines: The Victorian Archive and the Disappearance of the Book
Victorian Studies, 2006
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady, "But it's turtles all the way down!" (1) This paper is, in part, about the question of ground, a question that I would say lies at the heart or, rather, at the base of not only cyberspace but also postmodern culture generally. I wish also to continue a dialogue about Victorian studies itself, one taken up in a panel at the 2004 NAVSA conference by Amanda Anderson, Catherine Gallagher, and Matthew Rowlinson and published in the following spring issue of Victorian Studies. 1 I take as my point of departure Rowlinson's astute observation that "the association of NAVSA with a print journal establishes specificand arguably anachronistic-practices of reading and writing as the material basis of its members' collective identity" (241). He points out that NAVSA established this "arguably anachronistic" relationship despite the fact that "the founding of NAVSA. .. takes place in the context of far-reaching changes in the forms of scholarly publishing and communication" (241). Responding to Rowlinson's comments, I wish also to continue the discussion articulated by Anderson and Gallagher regarding the dominant theoretical maneuvers of the last twenty years of Victorian studies.
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians’ own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction’s contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways of thinking about contemporary historical fiction and its prevalence, popular appeal, and mnemonic function today.
Sustaining Tradition and Making a Difference: Jane Addams’s Writing on Memory
Journal of Social Science Studies, 2014
The aim of the paper is to present a largely present unknown contribution of Jane Addams, one of America's first female sociologists and the first American women to receive the Nobel Prize, to sociology of memory. It analyses Addams's book The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1917) where she directly addressed the issues of memory, its functions and the links between memory and emotions. In this work, Addams aimed to show how memory raises consciousness, restores dignity and gives life meaning. Addams's pioneering thinking about a power inherent in memory, brings to our attention the dual role memory as a reconciler to life and as a motor of change. Such an understanding of memory's power can be interpreted as the conceptualization of memory as a means of the sustaining tradition and making a difference.
‘travels of memory, imagination and fact’: Kate O'Brien's Archival Notes
Irish University Review 42.2 [pp. 254-272], 2012
This essay explores Kate O’Brien’s attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her late-life writing, much of which currently remains unpublished and/or uncollected. By analysing O’Brien’s archival material alongside her published non-fiction prose, significant insights into O’Brien’s thinking on the processes of memory, as well as her somewhat pained and contradictory relationship with the self and its expression, are brought to light. O’Brien’s Farewell Spain (1937), Teresa of Avila (1951), My Ireland (1962), and Presentation Parlour (1963) all establish a mode of self-articulation through the relationship of the self with place (Spain), and person (her female relations and forebears). As such, this essay argues that these texts form a series of carefully averted auto/biographies and further utilises archive theory to offer a framework through which O’Brien’s autobiographical impulse can be understood. Within this theoretical paradigm, O’Brien’s quest for self-articulation finally becomes a desire to capture the anticipation of memory, opposed to direct recollection, and to seek out literary forms within which to express those memories.
Cutting and Pasting the Popular Press: the Scrapbooks of Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819)
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 2020
This article offers a survey of the recently discovered scrapbooks collated over a number of decades by the Yorkshirewoman Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819). The large set of thirty-five volumes presents an important collection of press cuttings relating to the history and consequences of the French Revolution, and also contains 'historical and miscellaneous' material of a more eclectic nature. I argue that the texts significantly improve our understanding of Dorothy Richardson's position as a reader, writer and researcher working in the North of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, her set of albums raises important questions about the relationship between commonplacing and scrapbooking practices, and the capacity of such textual curatorship to function as a form of both political engagement and autobiographical expression.
Homes and haunts : memorialising Romantic writers
2012
Leahy and Dr Kostantinos Arvanitis. Their help, good humour and patience through the process was beyond the call of duty. A vote of thanks too to Joanne Marsh, the School Postgraduate Research Officer for "keeping me in the loop", and to Dr Ian Pople and all my fellow students in the University of Manchester Academic Writing group for showing me I was not alone. Further thanks are due to the following staff at the University of Chester: Professor Chris Walsh (Dean of Humanities) and the rest of the Senior Management Team, for their unstinting support, financially and otherwise; Dr Lisa Peters (Learning Resources) and Professor Dennis Holman, my gurus on all things technological; Dr Keith McLay (Head of Department of History and Archaeology), who repeatedly found the money and time to grant me research leave (no mean achievement in these uncertain times); Brenda Davies (Department Administrator), for knowing where things were; colleagues, past and present, in the Department of History and Archaeology, who took up my teaching and administrative duties, provided constructive advice at various stages during the process, and who all stepped into the breach to allow me time to get the thesis finished, when they were also under extreme pressure.