Narratives of Forgetting

Abstract

Drawing from two disciplines, memory studies and theories on life writing, this chapter aims to interrogate different reworkings, negotiations, and representations of memory and forgetting in memory texts in order to investigate how writing on remembrance/forgetting influences literary form. The chapter will provide an analysis of texts which use paratextual devices such as extensive footnotes, corrections, or multiple narratives, in order to accentuate the complications of writing memory. The focus is on particular representations and rewritings of the past, which for one reason or another, cast doubt on their own veracity and referentiality, and therefore align themselves more with the forgotten rather than remembrance. In these cases forgetting can be seen to take on form in narrative; as scenes of forgetting are apparent for instance where the gaps, the forgotten, the mis-remembered, is constantly drawn attention to. By analysing texts that bring to the foreground the memory processes at work in autobiographical writing, we can gain insight, not only into the nature of experimental texts of this type, but into autobiographical writing in general.