The Geography of Memory in the Novels of Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively’s treatment of the obsessive theme of memory is shown to challenge Western culture’s traditional opposition of the pure subjectivity of individual memory and of the autonomous objectivity of historical memory. Her novels continually pose the question of the link between personal and...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2023
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | Penelope Lively’s treatment of the obsessive theme of memory is shown to challenge Western culture’s traditional opposition of the pure subjectivity of individual memory and of the autonomous objectivity of historical memory. Her novels continually pose the question of the link between personal and historical memories, which are show to be interwoven, both finding their limits in intersubjectivity, contextuality or ‘social space’. Individual memory, being dependent upon sense perception and tethered to the physical world, escapes the subject’s control. Furthermore, memory as self-consciousness cannot be isolated from social context: thus part of ourselves escapes us because it lies outside us, in other people. Historical memory is also shown to be plural and slippery, because it cannot be free of interconnectedness. It is argued that Lively’s novels partake of a postmodern move from a predominantly historical to a predominantly geographical way of thinking, as defined by Michel Foucault and Edward Soja. Also, that what is ultimately being challenged is the self/other dichotomy, which underlies both the classical conception of the subject and modern science’s primacy of objectivity |
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