School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemFrom Baudelaire to Sebald via the Australian diaspora: migrancy, exile and reflective literary memories( 2012)While many studies in memory scholarship engage with memory as a discrete entity, this thesis engages with the field of memory’s literary representation. The thesis highlights literature’s active reflection upon memory, as well as its echo of the concerns with memory experienced more broadly in the late-twentieth century. Positioning itself at the intersection of twentieth-century literature and memory studies, this thesis argues that literary texts have made nuanced contributions to understandings of memory’s myriad roles and recent rise, in ways that are commonly unrecognised in memory studies scholarship. Informed by theories of temporality and place as well as by those of memory, the thesis embarks on an engaged, associative reading of different texts from three contexts of twentieth-century experience — the post-Second World War, the post- colonial and the post-migration. This reading reveals literature’s engagement with memory’s presence as well as its absence and, crucially, literature’s conjoining and complication of these qualities of memory. Looking to philosophies of memory and temporality in my first chapter, I examine the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as the work of Walter Benjamin, analysing how poetic form interrelates with representations of memory and time. This discussion provides a grounding and point of comparison for my second chapter, which engages with the work of Walter Benjamin from a somewhat different perspective, examining his semi-autobiographical prose on memory and modern place. By demonstrating the work of Benjamin’s writing in relocating the memory of place to a literary space, my discussion reveals memory’s interrelationship to prose as well as to poetry. These two chapters, entailing engagement with theories of temporality as well as with memory, reveal memory’s dynamic relationship with modern place and time, and with the temporal processes of writing itself—interrelations which bring to the fore memory’s complexities and absences. This discussion is the foundation for my study of memory in the late-twentieth century, where I engage with the presence as well as the promise of memory in writing, in the context of memory’s current fascination and recent rise. Moving to the work of W.G. Sebald, I argue that After Nature, his lesser-studied poem, realises the promise of memory in the post-war present, whilst also articulating the difficulties and losses of memory. This tension and duality, present to a lesser extent in Sebald’s prose, is productive of questioning insight into memory as well as writing. Moving to a further consideration of memory’s challenges and potentialities, I examine memory in the work of the post-colonial writer, J.M. Coetzee. Looking beyond the more thoroughly explored theme of history, this chapter examines memory in Coetzee’s memoirs and fiction, discussing the voice and presentation of childhood in Boyhood, and the fraught representation of the memories of others in the novel Foe. Examining memory in one further, literary context of the twentieth century, I explore the poetry and prose of the migrant Australian writer, Antigone Kefala, demonstrating how a reflective representation of post-migration memory entails a questioning of any one place as a point of home, and an ongoing experience of memory in the diaspora. In a final reflection on memory’s recent representations, I turn to a discussion of memory in contemporary art film. Noting the migration of memory themes and concerns across disciplines, I then consider how the structures of memory in film reorient and enrich approaches to memory in literature. Recent films, like recent writing, ask for a reflective engagement with memory that is conscious of representation as a means of record and of remembering, as well as a means of reorienting conceptions of memory, so that memory’s losses and absences as well as its presences are encountered.