Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Stories to Remember: Narrative and the Time of Memory

Stories to Remember: Narrative and the Time of Memory Stories to Remember Narrative and the Time of Memory Jens Brockmeier It has often been noted that the vividness and immediacy with which we remember certain events is independent of their remoteness in time. Days or years are no valid currency in the realm of remembrance. Our psychological life, as Freud stated, is timeless. Why does the unremarkable furniture of the kitchen in which my family ate dinner when I was a child still stay with me? What's so special about my old child's chair, which became increasingly rickety over the years due to my constant teetering? We all live in the midst of memories of rickety chairs, first kisses, and painful separations, irrespective of their age and ours and of whether we want to or not. For some, involuntary memories are a precious gift, as we know perhaps most famously from Marcel Proust, who seemed to have dedicated most of his life to the psychological and narrative experience of such mémoirs involontaire. Proust was well aware that our mnemonic life ignores the rules of common time and that memory has its own time. For a human being, he wrote, "is that ageless creature who has the faculty http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies University of Nebraska Press

Stories to Remember: Narrative and the Time of Memory

Download PDF
18 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/stories-to-remember-narrative-and-the-time-of-memory-08R4eb7GeG

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
2156-7204
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Stories to Remember Narrative and the Time of Memory Jens Brockmeier It has often been noted that the vividness and immediacy with which we remember certain events is independent of their remoteness in time. Days or years are no valid currency in the realm of remembrance. Our psychological life, as Freud stated, is timeless. Why does the unremarkable furniture of the kitchen in which my family ate dinner when I was a child still stay with me? What's so special about my old child's chair, which became increasingly rickety over the years due to my constant teetering? We all live in the midst of memories of rickety chairs, first kisses, and painful separations, irrespective of their age and ours and of whether we want to or not. For some, involuntary memories are a precious gift, as we know perhaps most famously from Marcel Proust, who seemed to have dedicated most of his life to the psychological and narrative experience of such mémoirs involontaire. Proust was well aware that our mnemonic life ignores the rules of common time and that memory has its own time. For a human being, he wrote, "is that ageless creature who has the faculty

Journal

StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Jul 30, 2009

There are no references for this article.