Memory as Seriality: Re-cognizing Gertrude Stein

Abstract

Abstract:Interrogating concepts of memory at the interfaces of literary and cultural studies and the cognitive sciences, this essay calls on the paradigmatic modernist Gertrude Stein. Stein’s sense of cognitive processes as repetition with variation—or insistence, as the author put it—not only highlights the value of the term seriality for an understanding of memory in both fields. Quite surprisingly, the author’s very resistance to memory closely relates to current notions, in cognition research, of how memory works: as a mode of perception that remembers forward rather than backward and that is highly dependent on forgetting.