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Telling Otherwise: Collective and Personal Remembering and Forgetting in Kate Atkinson’s "Life after Life"
Arias, Rosario
2015-12-21
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e-ISSN
2283-6438
Abstract
This paper aims at exploring collective and personal remembering, as well as the notion of forgetting as a kind of “‘rebeginning’ or finding the future by forgetting the past” (Galloway 3) in Kate Atkinson Costa prize-winning "Life after Life" (2013). In Atkinson’s novel Ursula Todd is born on February 11 1910, dies and is born again and again to undo the traumatic events that caused her previous death(s). The narrator’s retelling of Ursula’s life takes the reader through the two wars, and to different incarnations of Ursula’s life, which finally set things right for her and for her beloved ones. Following Paul Ricoeur’s "Memory, History, Forgetting" (2004) and Marc Augé’s "Oblivion" (2004), where they treat forgetting as being a positive figure, or “the reserve of forgetting” in Ricoeur’s terms, I will discuss the interlocked processes of remembering and forgetting, not only applied to individuals (like Ursula in "Life after Life"), but also to the community. Communal memory is particularly mobilised in the act of telling otherwise: “[t]hrough narrating one’s identity otherwise, a community can work through its past, have an acceptable understanding of itself, and to justice to others” (Leichter 124). Therefore, this paper will also look into the ways in which Atkinson’s novel engages with the concept of collective memory that, operating within an intersubjective model, underlines networks of individual and communal relations.
Series
Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere
XX (2015)
Publisher
EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste
Source
Rosario Arias, "Telling Otherwise: Collective and Personal Remembering and Forgetting in Kate Atkinson’s "Life after Life"" in: "Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere 20 - Memoria senza perdono. Dinamiche, retoriche e paradossi nelle rappresentazioni letterarie del trauma", a cura di Marilena Parlati, Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2015, pp. 125-142
Languages
en
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