Scraping Down the Past: Memory and Amnesia in W. G. Sebald\u27s Anti-narrative

Vanguard anti-narrativist Galen Strawson declares personal memory unimportant for self-constitution. But what if lapses of personal memory are sustained by a morally reprehensible amnesia about historical events, as happens in the work of German author W. G. Sebald? The importance of memory cannot be downplayed in such cases. Nevertheless, contrary to expectations, a concern for memory needn’t ally one with the narrativist view of the self. Recovery of historical and personal memory results in self-dissolution and not self-unity or understanding in Sebald’s characters. In the end, Sebald shows how memory can be significant, even imperative, within a deeply anti-narrativist outlook on the self, memory, and history

Historical Consciousness and Ethnicity: How Signifying the Past Influences the Fluctuations in Ethnic Boundary Maintenance

Theorists tend to limit \u27history\u27s\u27 role in the dynamics of ethnicity to that generally played by collective memory. By bringing the notion of historical consciousness to the fore, new possibilities may, however, emerge for discerning how history, as one cultural mode of remembering among many others, impacts both ethnicity delineations and fluctuations in boundary maintenance. In encapsulating the many forms of commemoration as well as the different dimensions of historical thinking, the contribution of historical consciousness accordingly lies on how group members historicize temporal change for moral orientation in time. By likewise signifying past events for negotiating their ethnicity and agency toward the \u27significant Other\u27, social actors gate-keep group boundaries. And, depending on their capacity and willingness to recognize the \u27significant Other\u27s\u27 moral and historical agency in the flow of time, they can transform group delineations and render ethnic boundaries more porous. Key Words: Historical Consciousness; Ethnicity; Group Boundaries; Boundary Maintenance; Boundary Fluctuations; Collective Memory; Disciplinary History; Moral and Historical Agency

Is history a coherent story?

This paper is a reflection on philosophy of history and a polemic in the debate on the legitimacy of grand narratives

Solitary Amnesia as National Memory: From Habermas to Luhmann

The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have been the subject of a fierce debate in the human sciences - especially, but not exclusively, in the study of nationalism. This paper re-investigates the nature of national memory in the context of European nationalisms by drawing on contemporary national cases of remembering and forgetting. The explored instances are mobilized in the study of remembering/forgetting on a factual, rather than ideal level. Theoretically, it is argued that the Habermassian call for fostering ‘anamnestic solidarity’ with the past often fails in practice because of its normative undertones that disagree with Realpolitic demands. This is so because nationalist discourse, which serves to preserve the political interests of the national community, has to present itself to political forces that reside outside the community as a closed, autopoetic system akin to that theorized by Niklas Luhmann. Although the Luhmannian thesis (which would gesture towards the autonomisation of national memory) also fails to explain the nature of nationalist remembering/forgetting tout court, it allows more space for an exploration of nationalist self-presentation than Habermas’ normative stance. The argument in this study, which combines an appreciation of hermeneutics and autopoeia, is that the practice of (re)producing the ‘nation’s’ solitary amnesia enables nationalist discourse to respond to external political pressures. This presents the latter as a dialogical/hermeneutic project despite its solipsistic ‘façade’

Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope : Reflections, Applications, Perspectives

The aim of this introductory article [to the volume of the same title], firstly, is to recapitulate the basic principles of Bakhtin’s initial theory as formulated in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics” (henceforth FTC) and “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historic Typology of the Novel)” (henceforth BSHR). Subsequently, we present some relevant elaborations of Bakhtin’s initial concept and a number of applications of chronotopic analysis, closing our state of the art by outlining two perspectives for further investigation. Some of the issues which we touch upon receive more detailed treatment in other contributions to this volume. Others may offer perspectives for future Bakhtin scholarship