Traumatic pasts, literary afterlives, and transcultural memory : new directions of literary and media memory studies

This article presents new directions of literary and media memory studies. It distinguishes between (1) the study of "traumatic pasts", i.e. representations of war and violence in literature and other media, (2) diachronic and intermedial approaches to "literary afterlives" and (3) recent insights into the inherent transculturality of memory and their consequences for literary and media studies. Keywords: cultural memory studies, literature and memory, media and memory, transcultural memor

Transcultural memory

“Transcultural memory” emerged in or around 2010 within the field of memory studies. The “transcultural turn” (Bond & Rapson 2014) describes the programmatic move away from the assumption that memory is the product of bounded “cultures”, often national cultures at that – an idea which had crept into a large section of memory research, especially in the wake of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire. Proponents of transcultural memory studies criticize such “methodological culturalism”. They emphasize..

Pamięć, język a dyskursy medialne - rozmowa z prof. Astrid Erll, prof. Bożeną Witosz i prof. Robertem Trabą

Pamięć, język a dyskursy medialne – rozmowa z prof. Astrid Erll, prof. Bożeną Witosz i prof. Robertem Trab

Mobilized memories: deployments of the past in the present and the future

Coordinators: Francisco Ferrándiz Martín, (ILLA, CSIC), Reyes Mate Rupérez (IFS, CSIC).Memory processes —as selective displays of the past in the present— are an essential component of the configuration and development of all human societies and affect areas that range from everyday gestures to high-level politics. The unfolding of memory is especially important in the constitution of individual and collective identities, and its enormous potential for cohesion is only comparable to its great capacity to generate exclusion, difference, and dispute. It is impossible to understand historical or contemporary conflicts in depth without analyzing the memory processes in which they are or have been immersed. Hence the strategic importance of this challenge for an institution such as CSIC. The approach to memory and memory processes is necessarily interdisciplinary, as it can be analyzed through the scientific fields of neurobiology, philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology, literary studies, religious studies, cultural studies, historiography, social anthropology, archeology, or cultural geography, among others. By reviewing the main historical, theoretical and thematic anchors of memory studies –with a special emphasis on CSIC-based research–, as well as their prospects for the future, this challenge proposes to proactively foster this interdisciplinarity to build a common analytical language substantially richer and more sophisticated than each of its individual parts

Reading Across Cultures: Global Narratives, Hotels and Railway Stations

This is the final version of the article. Available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record.This article takes its cue from the English critic, novelist and painter John Berger. He argues that what we know determines what we see. Hotels and railway stations, though they differ in size, design and appearance, are places of temporary national and international congress that are recognized by everyone. They become visible or even iconic once their history or their role is turned into at least part of a wider narrative—in literature, film or in other arts. This provides a representative focus by which we may read a city’s or a nation’s past. In exemplifying such connections I focus first on the long-term history of Friedrichstraße station and some of the surrounding hotels in the context of the history of Berlin, situating them within the national and, by implication, also the international context. Secondly, I will consider the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 as an event in which the role of railway stations generated both personal and collective memories across cultures and over several decades

Emerging trends in reassessing translation, conflict, and memory

New Approaches on Translation, Conflict, and Memory: Narratives of the Spanish Civil War and the Dictatorship is a collection of essays that endeavours to establish a new dialogue between translation, conflict, and memory studies. Focusing on cultural representations of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship, it explores the significance and the effect of translation within Spain and beyond. Drawing on fictional and non-fictional texts, reports from war zones, and audiovisual productions, the contributors to this volume examine the scope of translation in transmitting the conflict and the dictatorship from a contemporary perspective. Narratives produced during and after the Civil War and the dictatorship both in Spain and abroad have led to new debates arising from the reassessment of a conflict that continues to resonate