Memory and place : a phenomenological study

Abstract

Research on the relationship between place, memory, and identity has tended to focus on either 'felicitous' instances of domesticity (Bachelard, 1994), or on the unambiguous dualism between what constitutes a sense of place and what has perniciously been termed 'site', place divested of its specificity and reduced to a non-place (Casey, 1993, 1997, 2000). My thesis is a rejoinder to this dualism by redirecting the focus toward the memory of places that challenge rather than reinforce our sense of identity. In this way, I hope to advance a more nuanced and progressive understanding of the role place plays in shaping identity, a role that extends to transitional as well as domestic places. I achieve this by performing a phenomenological analysis on the ambiguous entwinement between place and memory, in both an everyday, transitional, and traumatic context. As I argue in my thesis, far from an additional component of memory and history, the spatiality of the past is not only central in the preservation of history but also fundamental to its emergence in the first instance. This implicit rejection of memory as being solely a temporal event leads me to a series of investigations aimed at assessing how memory can become spatialized and how space can be memorialised. Between this dynamic, the role of the body assumes a pivotal role in both facilitating access to the past but also problematizing that access, especially where the memory of trauma is concerned. Against the tendency to split place into dualistic 'modes', my account of the body as a mediator between self and world serves to undermine this dualism by arguing for a morphological rather than divisive absorption of place.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo