‘Toute la mémoire du monde’: words, books and libraries as spaces of memory in Georges Perec’s La vie mode d'emploi
Wednesday 18th October, 17:30 ---- Room G.05 50 George Square
We're pleased to be able to announce the details of the next LLC Work-in-Progress seminar. This week, Paul Leworthy, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, will be presenting a paper on the issue of space and memory in Perec's La vie mode d'emploi. Please join us for what promises to be another fascinating talk and discussion; as ever, there will be tea/coffee and biscuits.
Abstract:
Arguably itself one massive memory project, La vie mode d'emploi integrates myriad memory projects into its narrative. The countless characters collecting, cataloguing and conserving are central to the text which itself collects together memories, objects and stories across the spatial matrix of a cross-sectioned Parisian tenement block. In this paper, I will explore how particular intradiegetic spaces in the novel implicate, illustrate and interrogate particular ideas about individual and collective memory.
Setting narrative spaces in the text relating to the character of Albert Cinoc into dialogue with established spatial metaphors of memory, notably including the multifaceted figure of the archive, I will examine how the limits of memory are spatially represented in Perec’s novel. Specifically, I will home in on how specific spaces in the text probe, negotiate and embody the tension – central to all memory work – between remembering and forgetting.
Bio:
Paul Armstrong Leworthy is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature and Wolfson Scholar at The University of Edinburgh. He also teaches language and leads literature tutorials in French and German there. Previously, he studied modern foreign languages and European literatures at The University of Nottingham (BA Jt Hons) and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (MA).
His PhD research, supervised by Prof Peter Davies (German) and Dr Claire Boyle (French), investigates the nexus of space and memory in a number of post-war French and German novels, examining the configuration of memory in the material, fictional and discursive spaces implicated in the works.