Cultural Memory & the Dynamics of Literary Culture

Course: Contemporary Literary Culture 1 Prof.dr. Ben Peperkamp VU Amsterdam Version 2013

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Dynamics of Literary Culture

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Innovation:

Keywords: new, the presens, avant-garde, change…

Tradition:

Keywords: history, remembrance, the past, memory, canon, continuity, classics, transmission….

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‘Old stuff’ in dialogue with ‘the modern reader’

• Offering an window on centuries of dialogue between the Bible and literature, […] designed to help the modern reader understand how biblical

motifs, concepts, names, quotations and allusions

have been transmitted….

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Theoretical Perspective: Cultural Memory

Rigney, p. 366: ‘[Cultural Memory] focuses attention […] on the multiple ways in which images of the past are communicated and shared among members of a community through public acts of remembrance and through publicly accessible media which are sometimes commercially driven.’

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Starting Point: ‘Lieux de Mémoire’

‘Places of Remembrance’ • P. Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (7 volumes) (Gallimard, 1984-1992) • Writer’s houses, Literary Musea, Monuments…

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Heritage Tourism

• • ‘Though recogzined and revered as memorial site over many centuries, in recent years writer’s houses have grown into a major asset of heritage tourism. The number of houses turned into museums has significantly risen.’ Hendrix: Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory 2008, p. 1-2.

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Cimitero Acattolico

[Rome, near the Pyramid of Caius Cestius]

• ‘To John Keats and Severn at the center of the Cemetery’

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Grave

• • This Grave / contains all that was mortal,/ of a / YOUNG ENGLISH POET, / who / on his Death Bed,/ in the Bitterness of his Heart,/ at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, / desired / these Words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone / Here lies One / Whose Name is writ in Water / Feb. 24 th 1821

Erected by Friends.

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Representation of History (Biography)

Young English Poet, without a name and identity [‘a young poet´]. Bitter [‘in the Bitterness of his Heart’]. Dispeased and rejected [‘Malicious Power of his Enemies’].

• Paradox: text (water) / object (stone)

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Rome: Keats-Shelley Memorial House [Piazza di Spagna]

Since 1908 Museum

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Library with romantic books, drawings, furniture… faculteit letteren

…historical information

• “Romanticism. […] Never a unified and self-conscious movement, it resists definition. Romanticism does, however, have certain characteristics that distinguish it from the preceding age of Enlightment. Where the Enlightment emphasized objectivity and reason, Romanticism looked to the more

subjective and irrational parts of human nature: emotion, the imagination, genius, introspection, our response to the natural

world. […]”

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The room were Keats passed away… faculteit letteren

Representation of Illness

• [Copy of the] Portrait of John Keats in Rome, shortly before his death from tuberculosis in February 1821, by his friend Joseph Severn [Copy]. • Ashley MS 4165, f.v. Copyright © The British Library Board.

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Deathmask faculteit letteren

‘The Strange Case of Mr. Keats’ Tuberculosis’

• • ‘ Strange? What could be more typical than a young man, wasted, feverish, racked with cough and hemoptyses [bloedspuwingen]—dying? Indeed, the very

picture evokes the popular image of some romantic poets of the 19th Century; Keats’s tragic death at the age of 25 contributed to

that image.’ In: Clinical Infectious Diseases 38 (2004) p. 991–993.

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Poetical allusions…

• In her study Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century, Samantha Matthews points out that the graves of Keats and Shelley, situated near one another in the Cimiterio Acattolici (or Protestant Cemetery) in Rome, attracted more poems than the graves of all other British poets.

Analysis [following Nora]

• • • • Material dimensions: Grave, graveyard, flowers, memorial house, furniture, texts, drawings, photo’s, death mask, tourist guides, (educational) narratives… Different (converging) media Interconnected

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Analysis 2 [following Nora]

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Functional dimensions:

Cultural: dissemination of knowledge - canonical (literary) history, 19 th century culture… Economics: making money: art & tourism… Social: prestige, identity-formation: English culture in Rome, Italy

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Analysis 3 [following Nora & Bruner]

Symbolic dimension: the “story” of narrative which structures our experience of these objects and spaces Edward Bruner [ethnographic tourism studies]: Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. [Chicago, University Of Chicago Press: 2004]: “Experience may be the ultimate tourist commodity, but in itself, experience is inchoate [onrijp, onuitgewerkt] without an ordering narrative, for it is

the story, the telling, that makes sense of it all, and the story is

how people interpret their journey and their lives.”

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Meaning?

• The tragic biography of the romantic poet? • • • • • • Young, sensitive, melancholic, beautiful Artistic, briljant In exile [England / Italy] Lonely And: suffering And: victim

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Meaning?

• • His grave signified the exile of a foreign patriot, a melancholic marginalised plot on the edge of Rome reserved for non-Catholics, which in the 1820s only permitted the act of burial outside the hours of daylight. See more at: http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/2011/05/the allure-of-keatss-grave/

Literarary history: cultivating history

• • • Rigney p. 363: ‘wide ranges of […] activities’. Different (converging) media or strategies of representation Different actors and institutions (publishing houses, schools & teachers, musea….)

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Task

• • • (Historical) Description Analysis (material, functional, symbolic – cf. Nora) Rigney p. 369: [What] particular role do [media] play […] in fixing, transmitting, and transforming memories across time’?

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Example: Anne Frank Literary Texts / Editions / Translations – (

lecture 3 by Jacqueline Bel) faculteit letteren

Summerschool 2014

• http://en.literatuurensamenleving.nl/?page_id= 872 • http://www.studyabroadinamsterdam.nl/en/Im ages/Anne%20Frank%20in%20Amsterdam%20 and%20Beyond_tcm186-354376.pdf

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Example: (Academic) Historiography

Series of the ‘Taalunie’ Vgl. http://taalunieversum.or

g/literatuur/literatuurges chiedenis/ Dissertations, (Scientific) Articles

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Literature & Discussion

• Ann Rigney: Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans. In: Poetics Poetics Today 2004 25(2):361-396. http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org/cgi/content /abstract/25/2/361