Introduction to Unit 2:

Re-creating Home(s)

Literature in English III

2022
 1. What are the texts about?
2. Is it possible to identify themes in
common?

Pre Critical 3. Is space significant in any way?

4. How do the titles illuminate our
Responses reading and interpretation of the
texts?
5. Do you have any knowledge about
the authors? Is this knowledge, in
any way, significant?
6. What types of memory are rendered
in the texts?
  After a first phase of research on cultural
Memory memory, which took place in the early
Studies twentieth century (with Maurice Halbwachs
Today and Aby Warburg, among others), and a second
phase roughly starting with Pierre Nora’s
publication of Les lieux de mémoire – will there
be a third phase of memory studies? (Erll 4)

 Cultural  1990s: Memory studies entered the stage of ‘national memory
studies.’
Memory and  Nora’s approach binds memory, ethnicity, territory, and the
National nation-state together. The sites-of-memory approach was used as
a tool to reconstruct – and at the same time, to actively construct
Remembrance – national memory. (Erll 7)
 There are the many fuzzy edges of national memory. There is the
great internal heterogeneity of cultural remembering within the
nation-state. And there is the increasing relevance that formations
beyond the nation-state have for cultural remembering: the world
religions, global diasporas, the music culture, and consumer
culture generate transnational networks of memory. (Erll 8)
  What is the common denominator of work on transcultural
memory?
 It is certainly not the research objects, because, as in memory
Transcultural studies in general, there is an infinity of objects and topics that
can be studied. Neither is it the research methods. The
Memory multidisciplinarity of memory studies has generated great
methodological richness. Therefore, ‘transcultural memory’
seems to me rather a certain research perspective, a focus of
attention, which is directed towards mnemonic processes
unfolding across and beyond cultures. (9)
 I would like to conceive of transcultural memory as the incessant
wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of
memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations
through time and space, across social, linguistic and political
borders. (11)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psV9D09Swho
  ‘Transcultural memory’ as an approach is based on the insight that
memory fundamentally means movement: traffic between
individual and collective levels of remembering, circulation among
Transcultural social, medial, and semantic dimensions. Such an approach means

Memory moving away from site-bound, nation-bound, and in a naive sense,

cultures-bound research and displaying an interest in the mnemonic
dynamics unfolding across and beyond boundaries. Transcultural
memory studies would then imply a specific curiosity – an
attentiveness to the border-transcending dimensions of
remembering and forgetting. (15)
Rethinking the
texts in the  Do the texts represent travelling
memories?
light of  In what ways does memory travel?
transcultural  What sorts of boundaries do travelling
memory memories transcend?
