When: 5.30pm, Wednesday 25th January 2017
Where: G.02, 19 George Square Appleton Tower, Lecture Theatre 2
(note change of venue)
Paper: Making space for memory in Die Blechtrommel by Günter Grass
Presenter: Paul Leworthy
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We're pleased to announce details of next week’s LLC Work in Progress Seminar (Wednesday 25th January 2017).
Comparative Literature PhD candidate Paul Leworthy will be presenting his paper “Making space for memory in Die Blechtrommel by Günter Grass "
The seminar will take place at 5.30pm in G.02, 19 George Square. The event is open to everyone.
Come and join us for an exciting talk, a lively discussion and tea, coffee and biscuits!
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Abstract:
The ‘location’ of memory is notoriously difficult to concretely pinpoint. One’s memory occupies a liminal position between body and consciousness; remembering involves a peculiar interplay of past and present; memories of past events may be accurate or distorted, voluntary or involuntary, the orderly product of mnemonic training or wantonly unpredictable.
A widespread spatialisation of memory discourse can be seen to result from the difficulty of identifying the location of memory and the inherent tension in memory surrounding its (im)materiality. The struggle to account for memory’s curious capacity to be simultaneously present and absent has precipitated often problematic attempts to identify (imagined) spaces (imagined to be) inhabited by memory.
In literature, the operationalisation of space for memory work can be a productive and multifunctional narrative enterprise. As well as ‘storing’ and/or ‘producing’ memory content, memory spaces reveal crucial information about the dynamics of acts of memory and can also function as narrative nodes around which much of the important information (about memory) in the novel is organised.
In this paper I will explore some of the memory-spaces in Die Blechtrommel (1959). Grass’s novel is a novel about the past; it is a novel about remembering. Yet, Die Blechtrommel is also a novel about the present; it is a novel about storytelling. Specifically, I will be exploring how the production of narratives about the past entails the configuration of spaces so as to facilitate specific memory operations.
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About Paul:
Paul Armstrong Leworthy is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at The University of Edinburgh, where he also leads German literature and language tutorials. He studied modern foreign languages and European literatures at The University of Nottingham (BA 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.