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Class Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. In Search of Alias
Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction. The
American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1503-16.
Ser Jackson
Black,
Pam. Keeping Memory Lane Unclogged.Business
Week.8 Mar 1999. 116- 118. Ben McCorkle
Calle-Gruber and
Cixous book self-consciously troubles Cixous image as an
author from its very beginning.A
certain circularity is evident in the title itself where the book is
the author, the author the book, and the game of language the world
within which they exist in phenomena that escape forms and
essentialism.In this regard,
the first words in this work are quite accurate: Nous sommes
déjà dans la gueule de livre (We are already in the
jaws of the book).We enter a work that is concerned
with existence within language and its games.The
self is presupposed, and can only act, as dispersed in the book.It is constantly deferred along
with the language it works with(in), around, and along.
A conversation/interview between Cixous and Calle-Gruber
occupies the larger part of the book.It
reveals Cixous words at work within a context and a language
game that defer ever more authorial identity.The
notes from Cixous diary that appear at random in the text
emphasize the constant splits the self undergoes and the creation of
the self through language games.One is here reminded not only of
Derrida, whom Cixous mentions and of whom one essay is included in
the book, but also of Ludwig Wittgensteins notion of language
games: In language all is constituted, but nothing is set in stone,
nothing is permanent; every conversation and even every monologue is
a new language game that recreates feelings and selfhood in a
different way.
There
are essays, in Rootprints, by Calle-Gruber on Cixous
works.They give yet a different Cixous,
whose presence is now mediated, but no less strong.
The final part of the book is a short autobiography in
images and words that Cixous gives after a work where she showed us
her self in the jouissance of her loss in the text.
The
reader finishes the book with a few questions.Cixous
moves in this text between a poet and a poem, a self that is only
itself within the selflessness and the power of the text.There
is however some attempt at recuperating that self in the last,
autobiographical part.Cixous gives details, dates, faces,
and names.A well-defined
identity seems to emerge at the end or is at least hinted at.Was
this in Cixous and Calle-Grubers plans?Is the reader supposed to see the last chapter as an
attempt at salvaging the text?Or
is the fact that we are left with a question of this sort itself
further proof of the dispersiona happy loss of the
selfin the text?After
all, is not the arrangement of the book, which attempts to depart
from reality, a gesture toward a phenomenologically textual self?
Campbell,
George.From The
Philosophy of Rhetoric.The
Rhetorical Tradition.Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce
Herzberg.Boston: Bedford Books
of St. Martins P, 1990. 749-795.Melissa
Ianetta and Ben
McCorkle
In Campbells system, memory is the means by which we
achieve our understanding of the world. Through the incremental
evidence of our memory we gain understanding of common sense i.e.,
that which we know to be true.Evincing the tremendous impact of
faculty psychology, the Campbellian memory is not so much concerned
with retention or access of information but the manner in which
remembered experience constitutes our understanding of the world.
Although the model of memory discussed in this text appears
individualistic, Campbell does presuppose some universals that will
appear problematic to the postmodern reader.That
is, while admitting a difference between the lively signatures
of memory, which command an unlimited assent and those
fainter traces, he asserts that no man stands in
need of such assistance . . . to distinguish between them.In
other words, Campbell posits a self-verifiable inner truth to memory
that a post-Freudian, postmodern audience may find hard to accept.
Conway,
Jill Kerr.When Memory
Speaks. New York: Knopf, 1998.Mike
Sasso
Conway assumes that memoirs often include events
and thoughts that reveal the author's perception of how they see
themselves, frequently excluding known aspects of their lives.
Believing that autobiographical writing "is the most popular form of
fiction for modern readers," Conways study considers the
selectivity of autobiographical memory and expounds on the nuances of
the genre as a production of memory. She examines the memoirs of St.
Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, Benjamin Franklin, and Frederick
Douglass with great sensitivity for the cultural climates in which
they were written. Then she includes more recent autobiographical
works by Lee Iacocca, Ellen Glasgow, Gloria Steinem, Frank McCourt,
Jean-Dominique Bauby and Kathryn Harrison. Conway studies how these
autobiographical productions of memory reflect the views of their
eras and through that provide a historical perspective on our own.Conway
gives close attention to the forms and tropes of the culture
through which we report ourselves to ourselves and through that
project contemplates the inchoate complexity of memory's manifold
voices. This study unravels the interdependency of autobiography,
memories, and culture in a way that opens the scholar to further
inquiry in the literary production of identity and history.
Crowley,
Sharon.Modern Rhetoric
and Memory.Rhetorical
Memory and Delivery.Ed.
John Frederick Reynolds.Hillsdale:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.31-44.Haivan Hoang
SC criticizes
modernists in their effort to privilege individual reason
over collectivist ethical values.She references Plato to assert that
memory of a tradition is very intertwined with invention.If you ignore this memory-as-invention, then you ignore
a large part of rhetoric.With
increased literacy, memory arts have declined, and the
sovereignty of the individual creator has risen.However,
collective memory ought to play a larger role in our contemporary
rhetoric discourse.
Damasio,
Antonio R.Descartes
Error and the Future of Human Life.The
Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology.Ed.
James McConkey.New York:
Oxford UP, 1996.60-63.Haivan Hoang
AD claims that emotions are integral to reasoning, but we
dont understand how emotions inform logic.He
bases this conclusion on studies of neurological damage in brain
systems.Damaged instruments of
emotion cause individuals to make irrational personal and social
decisions.Therefore, we cannot split reason
from emotion from biological foundation.
Dillard,
Annie.Teaching a Stone
to Talk.The Anatomy of Memory: An
Anthology.Ed. James McConkey.New York: Oxford UP, 1996.Mark Letcher
While not specifically about memory, Dillards essay does touch on the ways in which our memories can shift with time.Primarily, the essay deals with the silence that surrounds modern humanity, since we have excluded God from our conversations.Dillard hears the silence (the absence of Gods voice from nature, in McConkeys words) everywhere, and claims that all we can do now is attempt to teach our own language to other creatures or objects, such as chimpanzees and stones.When writing of her several visits to the Galapagos Islands, Dillard realizes the power that time exerts on memory.On her initial visit, she had ignored the Palo santo trees on the islands in favor of the more entertaining sea lions.On her return visit, she sees the important significance of the trees, as witnesses to all that occurs, and she draws on her memories of the trees to fill out her definition.
Dubos,
Rene. From So Human an Animal.The Anatomy of Memory: An
Anthology.Ed. James McConkey.New York: Oxford UP, 1996.25-33.
Some evolutionary
remains are reflected in human behavior and can be traced back to
historical survival attributes; therefore, important to examine
environment and changes.Eventually, a change of
environment leads to a change in habits, which in turn modifies
characteristics of the organism (27).Culture
can act against or with physical environment in selective processes
implication that we should be more conscious of what whether
we act for or against certain selections.Populations of primates have
been repeatedly observed in nature to learn entirely new habits from
one of their members for example, washing food or unwrapping
and eating caramels.Changes in habit may eventually
alter the structure of animal societies and affect genetic
constitution through selective processes (29).
Dubus,
Andre.Broken Vessels.
Boston: Goding, 1991.Mike Sasso
Broken
Vessels is a series of autobiographical essays that are written and
collected from the perspective of the authors reckoning of an
accident that left him a paraplegic. The essays are a celebration and
inquiry into the memories that constructed the authors identity
and conclude with the title essay where Dubus attempts to redefine
himself as a father and agent in a new kind of life rather than the
victim of a random accident. The title essay, also included In
McConkeys anthology, The Anatomy of Memory, discusses
Dubus life as a disabled father, author and survivor of a
paralyzing injury. The discussion is unique because Dubus writes from
a position of discontent and personal searching rather than from the
position of reconciled memories and identity. The essay is useful as
a study of the reconstruction of memories for the sake of
establishing a revised identity following a traumatic and permanent
injury.
Edelman,
Gerald M.From Bright
Air, Brignt Fire.The
Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology.Ed.
James McConkey.New York:
Oxford UP, 1996.47-54.Haivan Hoang
The Enlightenment
served to bring reason and science to the forefront but failed to
recognize humanism.It is ridiculous and impossible to
explain human behavior solely in terms of biology we must
acknowledge social and developmental interactions.GE
differentiates between high order (conceptual) consciousness and
primary (immediate) consciousness.Such
a distinction means that we operate on different points in time
human freedom and uniqueness.This
recognition might move us from the Enlightenments reductionism
to human freedom.
Francoz,
Marion Joan.Habit as
Memory Incarnate.College
English.62.1.(September
1999): 11-29.Ser Jackson
Francoz
takes up, at the beginning of her essay, the question of why the more
recentscientific evidence surrounding
memorywhich suggests that memory is dynamic, biologically
unique, and yet, equally shaped by social environmenthas
been largely neglected in the field of composition studies and
rhetorical theory.In order to
arrive at a possible answer to this question, she discusses the
various metaphors that have been used for memory since classical
times, exploring the ways in which the idea of habit is incorporated
into such images.In this sense, it is a very useful
piece, for it traces our historical, literary, and scientific
perceptions of memory over time.The
three main images for memory, according to Francoz, are the
containment model, the hydraulic model, and the biological/body
model.Of these metaphors,
Francoz favors the latter, and she uses this image to propose an
answer as to why postmodern rhetorical theory has rejected memory.
Freud, Sigmund.My
Contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus.The
Anatomy of Memory. Ed. James McConkey. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
41-46.Ben McCorkle
This excerpt makes a handy complement to
Freuds seminal Interpretation of Dreams, giving us in
Freuds own words a context for the reasons and goals
surrounding the book¹s creation--a handy Cliff¹s
Notes abbreviation, only written by the author himself. Beyond
that, Freud goes on to reflect on his impressions of Popper-Lynkeus,
an anomaly in Freuds mind owing to Popper-Lynkeus own
account that his dreamscapes remain uncontaminated by illogical
components or bizarre themes and imagery. This produces a kind of
reverent awe in Freud¹s person, who see this as evidence of a
complete lack of repression, trauma, or any of the other Bogeymen
hes made a career of unearthing; consequently, Freud became
consumed with reading the fellow Jews prolific ouvre, which
consists of works addressing such global themes as social and
political issues of reform, humanistic endeavors, physics, andtheology, among others.
Gronbeck,
Bruce E.The Spoken and
the Seen:Phonocentric and Ocularcentric
Dimensions of Rhetorical Discourse.Rhetorical
Memory and Delivery:Classical
Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication.Hillsdale, N.J.:Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1993.139-56.
Nikki
Hamai
Building
upon Aristotles discussion of (retentive) memory versus
recollection (as well as the theories of rhetoricians like Longinus,
Bacon, Campbell, and Ong), Gronbeck equates memory/remembrance with
sight (when we remember, we resee or visualize) and recollection with
speech; thus the remembered/visualized and the recollected/spoken are
complementary in nature and represent the union of the social and
personal/psychological in our affairs.
Gronbeck
locates television as a site in which we can study the union of the
phonocentric and ocularcentric (for television fuses the spoken and
the visualizedrecollection and remembrancein a
unitary discourse); in addition, he feels certain that
further theoretical grounding of his tetrad THE VISUALIZED:THE
REMEMBERED::THE SPOKEN:THE RECOLLECTED will enable us to:(1)
appreciate better Ongs theory of secondary orality; (2)
recanonize memoria; (3) rebeatify Aristotle
(for his wisdom in De Memoria et Reminiscentia), and (4)
explore the wholeness of rhetorical discursivity
(154).
Grossman,
Pamela L.The Making of a
Teacher: Teacher Knowledge and Teacher Education.New
York: TCP, 1990.Mark
Letcher
Grossmans book,
which argues for the relevance of formal teacher education programs,
builds on the idea that Rorty introduced in 1975: the apprenticeship
of observation.Grossman defines the term as those
memories from a students own time in school, which may be
difficult to overcome as the student prepares to become a teacher.She
goes beyond simply recognizing the phenomenon, however, and offers
suggestions for teacher educators to overcome the apprenticeship.Among these strategies is
overcorrection, basically replacing one apprenticeship of observation
for another.For example, Grossman notes one
episode in a teacher training course in which [b]y
focusing on the disjunction between their own experiences as avid
readers and the reading habits of typical teenagers, the course
corrected for the tendency of prospective teachers to assume that
their own interest in books was representative (p. 130).While the book treats the
apprenticeship of observation as something which needs to be
overcome, it may be more helpful to value the importance of
teachers memories of their schooling, in order to build a
stronger connection between the ways in which they were taught, and
the ways they hope to teach their own students.
Hampl,
Patricia.Memory and
Imagination.The Anatomy of Memory.Ed. James McConkey. New York:Oxford
UP, 1996.201-11. Nikki Hamai
According
to Hampl, memoir is not a matter of transcription . . .
[and] memory itself is not a warehouse of finished stories,
not a static gallery of framed pictures; rather, memoir blends
personal history (memory) with invention (imagination/creativity)
(205).Writers and readers
alike should not expect memoir to be a textual rendering of
unadulterated truths and memoirists are not transcribers of factual
information; instead, we should view memoir as a rendering of
circumstances and details that a memoirist both remembers and invents
to reveal a symbolic truth and give meaning to life (for memory
is a personal confirmation of selfhood and memoir is both
spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the
personality as it seeks its narrative form and also grasps the
life-of-the-times as no political treatise can) (211).
Hesford,
Wendy S.Framing Identities:
Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.Hilary Harpe
Framing
Identitiesis
Hesfords argument for the acknowledged necessity of
multiculturalism to be meaningfully enacted in the pedagogical realm.She
indicates that examining both personal and collective memories is a
starting point for this process.As
examples, she illustrates uncomfortable moments of memory within
academic settings, covering writing classrooms, conferences, student
protests among other situations.The
negotiation that follows a clash of memory, is too often and too
subtly won by the traditional powers, setting back what
most academics inside and out of that structure would deem a goal.Her
solution is a self-critical approach to autobiography, in its various
forms, in which teachers think, as well as teach their students to
think, of their own autobiographies (personal, familial, and
cultural) in terms of the larger social history.
Hongo,
Garrett.Kubota.The Anatomy of Memory. Ed.
James McConkey.New York:Oxford
UP, 1996.299-309.Nikki Hamai
In
his memoir, Hongo explores the complexity of shared memory between
members of the same family and/or culture.He
begins by recounting his own memories of his maternal grandfather
memories:Kubota, his
grandfather, was a first generation Hawaii-born Japanese American who
founded and ran a Japanese-language school for the children of his
community.Although Hongo compellingly recalls
his grandfathers love of fishing and talking story
(the Hawaii-equivalent of the term chewing the fat), I
was most fascinated by his memories of his grandfathers
memories:Hongo retells his
grandfathers many stories of being persecuted by the FBI after
Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.Hongo
also shares the lesson his grandfather included in these stories:Study ha-ahd, [Kubota
would] say with pidgin emphasis.Learn
read good.Learn speak da kine
good English.The message is the familiar one taught to any children
of immigrantssucceed through education.And
imitation (303).
From
these familial memories, Hongo discusses the memories (particularly
of Pearl Harbor) that Japanese Americans share and which shape them
as a community.For instance, Hongo notes that
although Japanese Americans were affected by the bombing of Pearl
Harbor and have searing memories of internment camps (either first
hand memories or memories passed down to them by elders), most choose
to [pretend to] forget those memories: know the history, but do not dwell
on it; do not give voice to the experience (304).
On
a personal note, Hongos memoir resonates for me because I, too,
and a fourth generation Japanese American who was born in
Hawaii. I, too, have similar memories of my grandfathers (and
their memories).And I, too, share in the cultural
memory Hongo describesand find myself dwelling on it, writing
about it, voicing it even though I have been taught to be silent and
forget.
Hume,
David.A Treatise of Human
Nature.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.82-6; 108; 153; 199; 261. Frank
Darwiche
For Hume, all ideas are formed from impressions.Ideas are thus never first in the
chain of perceptionthey come second, from impressions.Ideas
eventually form complex relationships on various levels.Moreover, some ideas, for instance
those belonging to memory, are more vivid than others, such as those
belonging to the imagination. Hume contrasts memory with the
imagination, the former being different "in its superior force and
vivacity" (85).However, although the ideas stored
in memory are vivid, they may so degenerate that they are taken as
belonging to the imagination.On
the other hand "an idea of the imagination may acquire such a force
and vivacity, as to pass for an idea of the memory" (86).This
phenomenon is especially interesting when Hume connects it to liars
"who by frequent repetition of their lies, come at last to believe
and remember them, as realities."This
explains how belief can prove misleading if not dangerous: since it
always attends memory, if memory holds within itself false images and
ideas, than belief will be informed by and built on them.Moreover,
belief, according to Hume, discovers and produces personal identity:
a belief based on falsehood will thus create a false or distorted
identity (261).
Hume privileges memory over cause and effect.Since "force and vivacity are most conspicuous in the
memory" then we should trust it more than any other faculty: memory's
"assurance equals in many respects the assurance of a demonstration"
(153).Causes and effects, on
the other hand, are elements of our faculty of judgement, which
relies on less vivid ideas.Nevertheless,
Hume still regards conclusions we derive from causes and effects as
important, and he places them right below those we derive from
memory.
One should finally note that despite Hume's placing of
memory on so high a level, his empirical approach is throughout
informed by skepticism, a fact that eventually renders even memory
suspect, as his account on belief obviously shows (86).
James,
William.From The
Principles of Psychology.The
Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology.Ed. James McConkey.New
York: Oxford UP, 1996.136-142.Haivan Hoang
A man is distinguished
from brutes in his ability to form associations.Genius,
then, . . . is identical with the possession of similar association
to an extreme degree.Because
of our limited capacity to think, we lean towards one side of the
distinction between the analytic (scientific) and intuitive
(aesthetic); a genius can grasp both ends of the spectrum.
Joyce,
Michael."Beyond Next Before
You Once Again." Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century
Technologies.Ed. Gail E.
Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe.Logan:Utah State UP, 1999.399-417.J.
Chambley
Joyce
weaves together memorial, elegy and critique in this essay, calling
upon the relationship he shared with his mentor, the late poet
Sherman Paul. Through his memory of Paul's affirmation of his work as
"within the Green Tradition," Joyce moves into a critique of
electronic culture in general, and hypertext in particular, which
works toward "repossessing and renewing" the medium/culture, and
validating our experiences within it.In an attempt to sustain the
naturalin the emergence of electronic
culture, Joyce employs metaphors of nature wood, light, air,
and water--as well as a number of voices Irigaray, Cixous,
Haraway, Tikka, and others--to remember the connections between body,
self, and location.These moves are aimed at overcoming the claims of those
lamenting the "late age of print" (such as critic Sven Birkerts whose
implicit "distrust of the human community" challenges the hopefulness
that drives Joyce's critique [405] ).Situated,
as he has been in the past, at the center of the "supplant and
supplement question" (416), Joyce finally posits a third term
"succeed, with all its senses," suggesting that the ambition of
hypertext to succeed itself will be no less than that of the linear
narrative (416).The landscape
of electronic culture, for Joyce, has as much possibility and promise
as that of print culture.
Kandel,
Eric R., and Robert D. Hawkins. The Biological Basis of
Learning and Individuality. Scientific American (Sept.
1992): 79 86.Mike Sasso
Kandel and Hawkins article discusses the operation of memory from studies of brain mapping to cellular biology and investigates how the cognitive and neurobiological operation of the brain is effected during the formation of memories. Kandel and Hawkins argue that the brain changes in physiological structure through environmental sensory input. Therefore they believe that the human mind is as physiologically unique to the body that contains it. They also conclude that the neurobiological development and arrangement of neurons in the brain evolves through the experiences of an individual.
Kandel and Hawkins divide memory into two categories, declarative or explicit and non-declarative or implicit. Explicit learning requires structures in the temporal lobe of the brain and implicit memory is thought to be expressed through activation of the particular sensory and motor systems engaged by the learning task (132). Kandel and Hawkins argue that repeated motor tasks are memorized through long term potentiation (LTP) of the neuronal synapses that control the action. Repeated actions follow a predisposed neural path through the body. This places implicit memory within the body as a whole. In addition, the authors suggest that there might be a cellular alphabet for learning whereby the mechanisms of more complex types of learning may be elaborations or combinations of the mechanisms of simpler types of learning." In line with their theory, Kandell and Hawkins also divide memory into two types, conscious and unconscious. Higher reasoning requires conscious deliberation while unconscious learning is what the authors believe is a kind of synaptic predisposition. Learning and memory that is of a higher cognitive nature is stored through the interaction of the cortex and hypothalamus, locating complex thought, memory and learning in the brain rather than in the body.
Kelley,
Mary.Making Memory:
Designs of the Present on the Past.Acts
of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present.Ed.
Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer.Hanouver: Dartmouth, 1999.Haivan Hoang
MK discusses how women have
depicted the accomplishments of historical female figures and had
designs on their audience.The
women meant to shape their contemporary women, so they remembered
with intent.MKs point is to show us how
the past can impact our present depending on how we shape it.She says, Having tread upon the Republican
ground of Greece and Rome, as Edmund Randolph describe his
contemporaries engagement with the past, Randolph and other
members of the Revolutionary generation insisted that later
generations do the same.In the
decades following the Revolution, convictions akin to Randolphs
were displayed in seemingly endless admonitions to read, to meditate
upon, to learn from the past.Obviously,
its lessons had become a means by which to secure the newly
established American Republic (220).
Kingston,
Maxine Hong.From The
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.The Anatomy of Memory: An
Anthology.Ed.James
McConkey.New York: Oxford U P,
1996.274-285.Melissa Ianetta
In
this excerpt from The Woman Warrior Kingstons mother
tells the author the story of the nameless aunt, a woman
who has been deleted from the family history because of an
extramarital relationship and a subsequent bastard child.As
Kingston notes, her mother tells these family stories to instill
cultural values: Whenever she had to warn us about life, my
mother told stories.The author appropriates and revises
this familial tale, constructing alternative memories of her aunt in
which she is, respectively, a rape victim and a sexual aggressor.Through these alternate remembrances, Kingston looks to
a fictional memory for help: Unless I see her life branching
into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.As
does her mother, then, Kingston appropriates her aunts memory
for her own purposes.
The model of memory seen in Kingstons story
demonstrates the regularizing power of cultural memory.Issues
of control permeate the model of memory in this narrative:
Kingstons mother attempts to her daughter through memory;
Kingston attempts to control her own world through her memory of her
aunt; and society itself attempts to control Kingstons aunt
through the erasure of her existence.In sum, although this section of
The Woman Warrior does not explicitly deal with the rhetorical
uses of memory it nevertheless provides a powerful example of its
regularizing and subversive uses.
Lane, Patrick. "The Unyielding Phrase." Canadian
Literature 122-123 (1989): 57-64.Ser Jackson
Interspersing
his own memories and poetry with the work of other Canadian poets,
Lane deals with some of the reasons that authors often write
imaginatively about history. Canadian writers, he proposes, have
needed to write their history into existence, and this sort of
re-imagining or remaking actually transforms present knowledge of
Canadian history and geography, helping to give Canadians an
identity. He particularly discusses the poetry of John Newlove and
Margaret Atwood, asserting that poets such as these create a sense of
place through their imaginative combination of images and memories,
which in turn helps to foster cultural memory.
Lemonick,
Michael.Smart
Genes?Time.13 Sept 1999.Haivan
Hoang
Scientists
are starting to isolate the parts of the brain that make memory work.The question is: if you can improve
memory through biological knowledge, should you?Will
doing so increase levels of intelligence?
Luria, A. R.The
Mind of a Mnemonist.Trans. Lynn Solotaroff.New York: Basic Books, 1968. Haivan
Hoang
Psychologist
ARL writes a narrative of the case study of S, a patient of a memory
disorder.S remembers and
perceives language via synestheia, or experienced sounds through
multiple senses.However, S does not consciously
choose to perceive meaning in this manner.The
disorder did not allow him to function in terms of logical reasoning.There is a blurred line between
reality and imagination.
Marc, David.Mass
Memory:The Past inthe Age of Television.Rhetorical Memory and Delivery:Classical Concepts for Contemporary
Composition and Communication.Hillsdale,
N.J.:Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1993.125-38.Nikki
Hamai
Marc argues that technology has diminished the
necessity of memory:books have
shifted emphasis from reciting to citing;
thesauruses (and, I would add, spell and grammar check options) in
word processing programs may be detrimental to our vocabularies;
teleprompters provide the illusion that actors and newscasters are
speaking from memory (even though they are not actually exercising
that rhetorical faculty).In
this article, Marc focuses on the role of television as an external
public memory that continuously delivers and creates history in
the form of the news . . . [and] continuously represents and
interprets history in the form of dramatic programming (127).According
to Marcs perception of television, TV promotes continuity by
shaping and creating a public sphere for new data even as
it introduces change into the flow of public consciousness (133).
By drawing from the four prerequisites of Hans
Magnus Enzensberger (in The Consciousness Industry), Marc
delineates the ways that society can be ruled by media:
(1)People
must believe that intellectual enlightenment is the highest form of
human achievement and that such enlightenment is best (or only)
achieved by receiving information from TV and other playback devices;
(2)There must be a collective
memory of an event that proclaims equality and human rights as
official rhetoric (regardless of reality); (3)There must be economic prosperity
(because a society that is hungry may be distracted from
the media by their hunger/needs and thus may not be hypnotized by the
manipulations of the media); and (4) Technology must be able to
invade every facet of life with its electronic messages.(133-35)
As Marc notesand as we can plainly
seeAmerican society falls prey to the media on all four of the
above levels.Moreover, Marc believes that media
and many of American societys illssuch as the rising
rates of clinical depression, rape and suicide (and other acts of
random violence), divorce and child abandonment, and new
psychosomatic ailments (for example, Epstein-Barr Syndrome)are
evidence of a population that has been disconnected from the
roots of its organic capacity to remember:to
recall, to reexperience, to recuperate, to recreate itself
(137).
McClane, Kenneth. "A Death in the Family."The Anatomy ofMemory. Ed. James McConkey.Oxford:Oxford
UP, 1996: 265-273.Aaron
Oforlea
While reminiscing about the life and death of his
brother, Kenneth McClane tells what he learned from his brother's
lifestyle.He learned relationships between
siblings, friends, parents and children, and husband and wife are
often complex and complicated.McClane
had an uncivil and hostile with his brother Paul-- who died of
alcoholism at age of twenty-nine.McClane
says that their verbal and physical fights was "so angry and hate
filled" that on one occasion "he contemplated killing his
brother (266).
In this essay, through memory McClane
reconstructs, evaluates, and examines his brother self -destruction
and wonders why he and his parents, who had the "power," didn't
intervene and stop Paul's self-destruction (While his brother was
dying, his father avoided confronting his brother and his mother
chose optimism to fatalism.McClane chose to be objective--
bordering insensitive).After
Paul dies, McClane says that than he knew how much he admired his
brother's self-love and honesty.And, his brother's circumstance was
the consequence of living in a weak world.
McClane avoids being critical of his brother's
behavior or lifestyle.He tells
and explains about the anger and contempt Paul held for those who
loved him-- he threatened the life of his brother insulted his father
and mistreated and misused his girlfriends.However,
Paul's behavior, McClane blames on the cruel world instead of further
examining or exploring his own memories to answer tough penetration
questions like: Which memories haunted Paul? And,
in what ways do these memories manifest themselves.Another
avenue he failed to explore is his memories of his family's
interaction with Paul.
Middleton,
Joyce Irene.Oral Memory
and the Teaching of Literacy: Some Implications from Toni
Morrisons Song of Solomon.Rhetorical Memory and
Delivery.Ed. John Frederick Reynolds.Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1993.113-124.Haivan Hoang
JM throws out big
names in oral memory: Brandt, Goody, Havelock, Lentz, and Ong.She claims that we should NOT make orality and literacy
discrete, and she uses both Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass
illustrate this idea.Morrisons
Song of Solomon reflects cultural and generational conflicts
resulting from a declining oral memory.For
Milkman, writing externalizes culture whereas oral history is a means
for him to gain identity and voice.Douglass,
too, uses orality to gain literacy, thereby freeing himself.He
learns from the oral tradition of American revolutionary orators.Middleton
claims that, today, we must look at orality as part of memory b/c it
facilitates the link between inner and outer speech.We
must eradicate the false dichotomy and hierarchy between written and
other kinds of memory (e.g., oral).
Montaigne,
Michel.On Death.Anatomy of Memory.Ed. James McConkey. New York:Oxford UP, 1996.Sarah Adams
Montaigne's
essay meditates on the fear of death and the importance of
self-examination for better understanding and courage against death.
He describes various instances of a meditative or scholarly attitude
dispersing the fear of death and recommends that men examine their
own near death experiences, such as sleep and physical trauma, as a
means to learn what actual death will be like. Montaigne justifies
the use of his own near death experience as an example by arguing
that man's ultimate source of information about the world is himself.
For the purposes of this class the process by which Montaigne's own
memory was restored after his accident is particularly notable. It
raises both issues of the pre-existent self and the constructed
aspects of memory. His memory of his accident came back only after
several days in which his friends described and redescribed the
incident but when he did remember he recalled details, which had been
deliberately kept from him.
Morrison,
Toni.The Site of
Memory.Inventing The Truth.Ed. William Zinsser.Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998.185-200.Simone
Poindexter
Toni
Morrison discusses the slave narrative as a form of autobiography
that is of significant importance to her own literary heritage.The two principal purposes of the narratives were 1) to
record the historical life of a slave and at the same time, represent
the race, and 2) to persuade other readersusually white people,
of slaves humanity and to plea for the abolition of slavery.Objectivity
was a key element of an appropriate and effective slave narrative.Morrison
explains the characteristics of the slave narrative and the necessity
of concealing their [the slaves] interior lives.
Morrisons self-appointed job is to rip that veil
and make public that which had been too terrible to relate
(191).Because she must trust her own recollections and also
rely heavily on the recollections of others, memory and imagination
play key roles in accessing the interior lives of slaves.Morrison
explains that for her, it is not an issue of the difference
between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth
(193).She further explains that due to
the nature of her work, it is most productive for her to work with
recollections that move from the image to the text. Not from
text to image (194).
Moulthrop,
Stuart."Everybody's Elegies."
Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century
Technologies.Ed. Gail E.
Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe.Logan:Utah State UP, 1999.418-424.J.
Chambley
Moulthrop's
response to part four of this compilation, Searching for Notions of
Our Postmodern Literate Selves in an Electronic World, addresses the
ways in which the essays of Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Amato, Eldred
and Joyce exhibit the tension between recollection and the "need to
tell and consider stories of the near as well as the distant past, or
about events that are still unfolding" (422).Moulthrop
turns to Joyce's metaphor of stream and parallel banks, a well-known
representation of the hypertext/print culture divide, to highlight
the need for attempting "[s]tories from the near present"
(422).He then contributes his own elegy, reflecting on a
recent decision to withhold a collaborative hypertext, authored by
grad students, from publication in the on-line journal Postmodern
Culture.This reflection
opens into considerations of the boundaries between hypertext and
print, and expression and commodity.Finally,
Moulthrop calls upon us to "think about the future as well as the
past" (424) inour considerations of what
publication means in both print and electronic culture.In
doing so, we should note that one thing publication means is that the
thing published will be remembered in particular ways unavailable to
things that are rejected for publication.Thus
the politics of publishing effects what gets officially remembered.
Mura,
David. Prologue: Silences. Where the Body Meets
Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. New York:
Doubleday, 1996. 2-20.Mike Sasso
Prologue:
Silences discusses Muras personal quest for identity as
an Asian American Jewish male in contemporary American society. The
essay is written as a memoir that recounts the stories and personal
experiences that Mura believes is the substance of his racial and
sexual identity.He describes
every event in his memoir as though he was consciously present. Much
of Muras memoir is constructed from family stories that range
from his birth to the Japanese concentration camps that the USA
operated during WWII.Muras military and patriotic
affiliation and conflict is explored without substantial reflection.
Mura also ventures into a first person account of the way American
culture shaped his sexual orientation and his marriage to a white
American woman. In reference to raising his own children, Mura
balances his multi-ethnic heritage with contemporary American living.
He also wrestles with the question of his parents past and his
own identity. He writes, I know there are connections from my
parents past to mine, to my childhood and who Ive become.
Our stories cant be separated really. We are mirrors for each
other. (18). Mura compares his memory project to the work of a
bricoleur, a handyman who makes due with the fragments and tools that
are available for him to work with to assemble a workable history
that informs his own sense of identity.
Mura,
David.Where the Body Meets
Memory.New York: Doubleday, 1996.2-20.Simone
Poindexter
David Mura contemplates his parents willful
disremembrance of Japanese internment camps, his parents and his own
assimilation into the dominant white culture, and what type of
identity issues his bi-racial children will encounter.Muras
writing is significantly influenced by his inner struggles between
the values that white dominant culture has imposed upon him and the
values that have developed as a result his own self-identity
searches.The two main themes
of Muras writing are: 1) his parents refusal to remember and
acknowledge the wrongs of the Japanese internment camps and; 2) his
uncontrollable obsession with his wifes whiteness.Due to his parents eager
assimilation into American culture, Mura knew little about his
Japanese American heritage until, as a young adult, he spent a year
in Japan.This experience
awakened a strong desire within Mura to examine his identity as a
Japanese American and also to examine his position in society.Much
of his identity examinations are centered around miscegenation.While Mura is obviously aware of his obsession with the
fact that he married a white woman, he does not seem to recognize how
he objectifies her through what seems to be an inability to look
beyond color.Forever perplexed by the
construction of race and cultural codes in the United States, Mura
questions how his childrens multicultural heritage will affect
them and their identity choices in the future.Like
Toni Morrison, Mura also questions what should be passed
on.He resolves that he
cannot vouch for the truth of his versions of the pasthe
can only say that they are his (19).
Nabokov,
Vladimir.Speak, Memory: An
Autobiography Revisited.New
York: Vintage Books, 1989. Mark Letcher
This
selection contains excerpts from Speak, Memory, a collection
of Nabokovs remembrances of his early childhood in St.
Petersburg, to his move to the United States in 1940.Nabokov elicits these images, even
though he labels it as my desperate attempt (p. 95).The
language in the selections is Nabokov at his finest, evoking memories
long past, as clearly as if they had happened just recently.Of particular interest are his
loving descriptions of Mademoiselle, Nabokovs French governess
in his early childhood.The
detail with which Nabokov renders Mademoiselle is striking, yet a
reader cannot help but be reminded of Nabokovs allusion to his
own fiction, and wonder where the exactly is the line between our
true memory, and the memory that we construct.
Oakely, Todd. "The Human Rhetorical
Potential." Written Communication 16.1 (Jan. 1999): 93 -
128. Mike Sasso
Oakley's article links the rhetorical structures
of meaning to the structures of the brain, body and the world. By
exploring the recent neurophysiological research of Sereno and
Damasio on the cognitive operation of memory, Oakley believes that
"meaning making" cognitive activity is linked to the presence of
somatic markers in the brain. These somatic markers indicate the
primacy of emotive value judgments in the process of the storage,
retrieval and meaningful association of memories. Oakley suggests
that the brain can be physically stimulated by rhetorically arranged
sensory input that invokes the reassociation of memories in the
formation of significantly new ideas.Oakley
explores the journalistic rhetoric that surrounds the metaphor
"tombstone technology" to show how the invocation of values and
emotions can bring an array of culturally significant memories into
the process of cognitive reasoning.Oakley's article argues that "a
useful theory of meaning construction must be tied to the
circumstances of physical embodiment and, ultimately, applied in
detailed empirical studies of discourse production."
Pert, Candace B. Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel
the Way You Feel.New York:
Scribner, 1997.Ser Jackson
Perts
piece, as the title indicates, takes up the idea of a biochemical
basis for emotion, emotion being inclusive, in her definition, of
many things: memory can be what we typically associate with the term
(anger, joy, etc.), sensations such as pleasure, drive states such as
hunger, or what Pert calls intangible, subjective
experiences such as spiritual inspiration.She
challenges the traditional neurocentric assumption that
emotions are controlled in certain parts of the brain in favor of a
theory in which neuropeptides and their receptors are more actively
involved in the process of emotion.Pert
goes on to address the famous James-Cannon debateover whether
the emotions originate in the body or in the brainconcluding
that, its both and neither!Its
simultaneousa two-way street!While
some of the scientific language in the piece can be challenging, the
article is of great value, in that Pert expressesin an
accessible and joyful waythat emotions and bodily sensations
are intertwined; she confirms that there is such a thing as bodily
memory, and, in fact, all emotional experience is just this.
Pinker,
Steven.How the Mind
Works.New York: Norton, 1997.MIT.Ben
McCorkle
Psychologist
Steven Pinkers best-selling book draws heavily upon pop culture
references-- The Far Side, Star Trek, Magic Eye posters--as well as
more conventional disciplines such as history, literature, and
science to develop a popularly digestible theory of cognitive
neuroscience. His approach suggests that as a species, human beings
have evolved biolinguistically, echoing similar sentiments found in
the thinking of some of the biologists anthologized in
McConkeys book, such as René Dubos or Lewis Thomas--the
species¹ development of social memory and other intellectual
activities as a collective entity is not unlike, say, a termite
colony.
Plato."Phaedrus." The Dialogues of
Plato.Trans.Benjamin Jowett.New York: Livelight, 1954. Frank Darwiche
Plato emphasizes, from the very beginning, the importance of
the situation in which the dialogue will develop: location, rather
than a written text, evokes certain memories that help and inform the
dialogue (435-7).
Later,
rather than present the book's power as inherent in its text, Plato,
in the guise of Socrates, places the book's authority in its being a
physical object that can take him all over the world and thus place
him in many different situations (439).
Then
comes an allegorical description of love and the various types of
souls, the most noble being that of the philosopher, who is thus the
most able and appropriate rhetorician, the one who informs his
rhetoric by good and noble ethics so that he might enlighten other
souls (442-60).
Finally,
Socrates turns to writing and compares it to painting, whose
creations "have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a
question they preserve a solemn silence" (461).Writing
captures but a moment and cannot go beyond itself: it is dead because
it is still, unchanging, like Egypt.Socrates
contrasts this static image of writing to the power of the "word
graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows
when to speak and when to be silent" (462).The oral then, which is plastic, is
superior to the written: the former allows for memory to develop, the
latter announces memory's demise (464).This
is an important issue to Plato, for whom the soul, who has left her
heavenly abode, needs to remember the days when she was near her
creator, so that she may finally return to a position as close to him
as possible.
Plato's
problem, however, lies in the fact that he himself wrote his
work: if anything he once wrote has been committed to memory today,
it is because it was written down.Moreover, even though his words are now present on
paper, they are not memorized word for word; rather, they are read,
discussed, and critiqued dialectically, much as the oral epistemology
he advocates.It is just as hard to see orality
operating alone, as it is to see textual work as static or
logocentric.
Poincare,
Henri.Mathematical
Creation.The Anatomy of Memory: An
Anthology.Ed. James McConkey.New York: Oxford UP, 1996.126-135.Haivan
Hoang
Questions HP poses: if math is pure reasoning, then how come
some are not good at math?Need
memory and need to re-invent solutions.Therefore,
math equals inventing and discerning.
Pope,
Mary Elizabeth.Teacher
Training.The Fourth
Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/On Creative Non-Fiction.Eds. Robert L. Rest, Jr., and Michael Steinberg.New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1999.434-439.Mark
Letcher
Popes piece,
which originated in a graduate nonfiction writing class as a journal
activity, recalls the authors initial experiences as a graduate
teaching assistant.In front of her first freshman composition class, Pope
transports the reader to her first meeting with Mrs. Crane, her fifth
grade teacher.The events in the two classrooms
parallel each other, and the reader can easily trace Popes
feelings for her early teacher, from infatuation to frustration, to
resentment and anger.Meanwhile, Popes actions in
her composition class illustrate how she has used Mrs. Crane as a
model for her own teaching, but not as a positive one.Popes
actions in her own class utilize the opposite of the strategies that
Mrs. Crane used on her, and the effects on Popes students are
much more encouraging.Pope, in effect, draws on her
negative apprenticeship of observation in the fifth grade, to give
herself a model to work against in her composition classroom.The
differences between Pope the fifth grader, and her own freshmen are
evident, and it is obvious that Pope has learned something valuable
from Mrs. Crane.This article
is valuable not only for the creative use of dual memories, but also
for the way in which it illustrates the powerful grip that school
memories can hold on teachers, years after the fact.
Proust,
Marcel.From
Remembrance of Things Past.The
Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology.Ed. James McConkey.New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996.190-200.Frank
Darwiche
If
anything, Prousts work, A la recherche du temps perdu,
gives voice to the philosophical investigation of memory.There
is an intertwining herein of memory and imagination.If anything, this intertwining
works out in narrative, and thus more extensive terms, the close
relationship Hume draws between memory and imagination.Indeed,
Prousts novel, as it is typified in this excerpt, goes further
ends up presenting these two faculties as inseparable; it thus gives
the memory a plasticity that takes it outside its definition and into
its work within the cognitive and the inventive spheres of mind
activity.We should however note what this portrait, as it arises
from the novel, of memory does to the question of reliability in
autobiography, all the more so as Prousts novel is presented,
especially the first book, Du côté de chez Swann,
in the words of a narrator, who is and is not Marcel Proust: the
distance between the two Marcels can be seen as a metaphor of the
distance between the reality of past events and the memory who tells
its story by re-collecting some events and re-creating others.
Quintilian.From Institutes of
Oratory.The Rhetorical Tradition.Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce
Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martins P, 1990.
297-364.Melissa Ianetta and Ben
McCorkle
As
it focuses upon the education of the young rhetor-to-be,
Quintilians Institutes of Oratory has a pedagogical
emphasis.Thus, the discussion
of memory found in this text focuses on the development of memory in
rhetorical training as well as the appropriate use of the
well-developed memory.While this model of use follows the
storehouse paradigm, Quintilian cautions the reader against setting
boys to memorize general speeches: For what can such men
produce appropriate to particular causes, of which the aspect is
perpetually varied and new?How can they reply to questions
propounded by the opposite party?Clearly,
there are limits to the usefulness of the storehouse of memory.
Quintilian does hold however that the best students excel at
memory work.Accordingly, he
argues that students should declaim the works of others, both for the
practice in memorization and for the added benefit of internalizing
material from the great speakers.If
Quintilian is careful to point out the flaws of an uncritical
over-reliance on memory, then, he also sees the need for this faculty
to be well developed in students.
Reynolds,
John Frederick.Memory
Issues in Composition Studies. Rhetorical Memory and
Delivery.Ed. John Frederick Reynolds.Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1993.1-15.Haivan
Hoang
Reynolds opens
anthology with overview of the function of memory and delivery in
contemporary composition studies.There
are five canons of rhetoric: invention (content, discovery),
disposition (arrangement, organization), style (diction, elocution),
memory (mnemotechniques), delivery (voice, gesture, presentation).Latin:inventio, dispositio, elocutio,
memoria, pronuntiatio/actio.Greek:heurisis, taxis, lexis, mneme,
hypokrisis.Although all five
canons are essential to understanding modern rhetoric, we often
ignore, separate, and/or oversimplify them, especially memory and
delivery.In 65, Edward Corbetts
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student dismisses memory
since it isnt necessary to written discourse.Since
then, Frances Yates (The Art of Memory), Mary Carruthers
(The Book of Memory), and Patrick Mahony (McLuhan in the
Light of Classical Rhetoric) focus more on memory.
Four areas of memory
studies in composition:
1.Memory
as mnemonics:
to facilitate thinking, retention, and recall.
·Walter Ong and Eric Havelock discuss transition
from oral to written, discuss visual space as part of adaptation.
2.Memory as memorableness: to make written
words, ideas, phrases, and arrangements memorable so as to facilitate
memory.
3.Memory as databases: to distinguish between
natural and artificial memory.
·R. Cyperts says that natural encourages narrative
while artificial encourages analysis.
·Richard Young and Patricia Sullivan discuss our
writing b/c of limited memory.
·George Hillocks says short term influences style
while long term influences ideas and structure.
·Linda Flower and John Hayes link memory to
composition.
·Winifred Horner writes Rhetoric in the
Classical Tradition text and employs all canons of classical
rhetoric.
4.Memory as psychology:
·Linda Flower links neuropsychology and cognitive.
·Walter Ong and Eric Havelock say memory changes
formation of psychological consciousness.
·Welch says psychological unconscious is link from
past to present.
Sacks,
Oliver.A New Vision of
the Mind.Natures Imagination.Ed. John Cornwell. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1995. 101-121.Ben
McCorkle
Sacks
article is a very accessible distillation of the comparatively dense
work of Gerald
Edelman,
the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection [TNGS], or
Neural Darwinism. Basically a paraphrasing of
Edelman¹s work, Sacks describes how conceptualizations involve
the recategorization of various cognitive maps in the
mind and how these maps are constantly in dynamic flux with one
another. Sacks goes on to liken this process to the classical model
of memory, in which a fixed record or trace or representation
is stored in the brain--an entirely static or mechanical concept--but
requires a concept of memory as active and inventive
(115).
Savin-Williams,
Ritch.... And Then I
Became Gay,Young
Mens Stories. New York:Routledge,
1998.Mick Weems
This
text is composed of interviews with gay and bisexual youths about
their memories of being different because of their sexualities.The stories are anonymous and
brief, interspersed with graphs and comments as to how they fit into
the project as a whole.The book is laid out in terms of
milestones, Important events in the development of their
identities, such as awareness of same-sex attractions,
first disclosed to other, and first same-sex
romance.The author wants to
show the diversity of expression and experience in gay and bisexual
youth, as well as the ways in which their stories form patterns and
show groups within the group.
Selfe,
Cynthia L."Lest We Think the
Revolution is a Revolution:Images
of Technology and the Nature of Change."Passions,
Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies.Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L.
Selfe.Logan:Utah State UP, 1999.293-322.J.
Chambley
Cynthia
Selfe's critical attention to the WWW continues, with this current
article, to focus on floating the promises of the Passions
discourse on technology alongside the representations that emerge in
its proliferation.Of import is
her sense ofthis selection of
commercial representations as "laden with cultural information, shot
through with the values, ideological positions, and social
understandings that comprise our shared experience" (294).Selfe
examines twenty-four images from a variety of technological
marketeers through a series of narratives that she suggests reflects
what we as Americans anticipate to be the value of technology.She
couples these narratives--"The 'Global Village,'" ""Land of Equal
Opportunity," and "The Un-Gendered Utopia"--with her own re-visions
of the narratives--"The Electronic Colonial Narrative," "Land of
Difference," and "The Same Old Gendered Stuff"--to explore the
"forces of stasis" which complicate our relationship with technology
(293).Here, as elsewhere,
Selfe maintains that "educating students to be critically informed
technology scholars rather than simply expert technology users" is
the key to enacting the types of changes required in this new arena
of cultural memory.
Soyinka,
Wole.The Burden of Memory,
the Muse of Forgiveness.New
York:Oxford, 1999.Mick Weems
This
is a collection of lectures given at Harvard University in April of
1997.Soyinka addresses the issues of
racism, tribalism, slavery, religio-colonial domination, massacre,
political oppression, and what to do about the wrongs committed in
the past, both those which happened prior to living memory and those
atrocities which are recent enough that the perpetrators are still
with us.It is about problems of restitution, reparation, and
identity, written by a man who has seen his own share of jail time as
an activist in Nigeria.With
unblinking candor and a strong sense of humor, Soyinka takes us
throughout Africa (both continental and diasporic) and across time on
a spiritual/transpolitical pilgrimage of human injury and requite,
giving his own controversial and insightful take as a poet, voice of
conscience, Black man, African, Nigerian, international scholar, and
Yoruba elder.
Squire,
Larry R.Memory and Brain
Systems.From Brains
to Consciousness?Essays on the
New Sciences of the Mind.Ed.
Steven Rose.Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998.53-72.Hilary Harpe
In this article, Squire divides human
memory into two biologically distinct yet cooperative memory systems:
declarative and non declarative.The
article focuses more on what neuroscience has been able to discover
about the forming of non-declarative memories.Squire
uses case studies of amnesia patients who have lost the ability to
form declarative memory to establish exactly which functions are
included in the non-declarative memory sphere.These
include habit forming, priming, classical conditioning, and
non-associative learning.According to further studies he
cites, non-declarative memory formation depends upon the brains
plasticity, unconscious mind, and time.He
links this facility of mind to evolutionary processes, as well as the
formation of identity.
Sturken,
Marita.Tangled Memories:
The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering.Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997.Hilary
Harpe
Sturken uses two sources of national trauma, the Vietnam War
and the AIDS epidemic, as case studies in the formation of national
cultural memory.Sturken
acknowledges the multitude of voices within a nation and focuses her
inquiry into how those voices negotiate over acceptance into
national memory. In her model for this process, she
situates cultural memory in between personal memory and history.Whereas
history is the officially sanctioned narrative (or more often group
of narratives) which strives for closure, cultural memory remains
dynamic, getting its authority from agreements or similarities among
narratives of survivors or their families.Sturken
argues that artistic and political performances of cultural memories
are the answer to the postmodern challenge of memory, as well as a
prescription for healing from national trauma.Finally,
she places primacy on negotiating cultural memory by citing examples
of trauma survivors whose personal memories are, through time,
usurped by collective cultural images.
Vico,
Giambattista.From On the
Study Methods of Our Time.The
Rhetorical Tradition.Eds.
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books of St.
Martin¹s P, 1990. 711-727.Melissa
Ianetta and Ben McCorkle
Vico
rejects Cartesian logic which he terms modern
philosophical critique by emphasizing the relationships
among language, knowledge and the individual.Cartesian
logic, he argues, rejects varied thought for a limited range of
mathematical and scientific models.Instead
of relying exclusively on this modern philosophical
critique, he concludes, the scholar should draw upon a variety
of models, both Cartesian and rhetorical.
Reflecting
the influence of Francis Bacons division of the mind into
faculties, Vico talks about the processes of imagination,
reason and passion as they relate to language. Intriguingly, Vico
nearly collapses memory and imagination into one another.These
virtually identical forces are, he argues, most dominant in the
young, and so students should be exposed to those disciplines of
study that will exploit these forces, rather than being unnecessarily
restricted to a Cartesian-based curriculum.
Warner,
Esther.Excerpt from
The Crossing Fee.The Anatomy of Memory.Ed. James McConkey.New York: Oxford University Press,
1996. 104-114.Hilary Harpe
At least two perspectives of memory can be examined in
Warners account of her experiences in Liberia.Through
Warners story, the reader gains some access to the village
chief, Konsuos memory.Konsuo,
as a reaction to a changing Liberia in which things
suddenly gain disturbing importance, relocated his village and
re-constructed from his memory a village which operated according to
his version of traditional values.On another level, the reader can
examine Warners own re-construction of this village as a sort
of memory, which raises issues as to who has the right to remember.Warner
laments the encroaching materialism that will soon turn the village
into a museum.The piece has
implications for the way in which capitalist societies will impose
frames, i.e. those around tourist sites, on societies of any other
kind.
Welch,
Kathleen E. Reconfiguring Writing and Delivery in Secondary
Orality.Rhetorical Memory and Delivery:
Classical Concepts of Contemporary Composition and
Communication. John Fredrick Reynolds, Ed. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.Mike
Sasso
Welchs article
repositions the classical rhetorical cannons of memory and delivery
within contemporary literacy, writing practices and a culture of
secondary orality. Welch says that western cultures approach to
process oriented writing instruction has squelched the connections
between traditional literary study and the traditional study of
writing and consequently changed scholarly concepts of the role that
memory and delivery traditionally played in the five cannons of
rhetoric. Welch disagrees with the standard explanation that memory
and delivery, which was once very important to orally dominant
cultures, is not relevant to cultures of written literacy. According
to Welch Memory and delivery do not wither with the growing
dominance of writing; rather, they change form (19). Welch
traces the transformation of the cannons of memory and delivery
because of the influence of writing textbooks that ignore their
importance and changing role in the composition process. Welch
accuses textbook producers of imitating one anothers
mistakes.
By positioning memory
and delivery within Ongs concept of secondary orality arguing
that this new communication trend demonstrates a culture that has not
eliminated either writing or the oral traditions of discourse. Welch
says that there is not so much a loss as there is a change.She
discusses the tropes of classical rhetorical rhetoric that are
present in the repetition, formulaic and additive practices in the
secondary orality of our culture. Like Ong, she compares the
rhetorical moves of NBC Nightly News to those of the
Odyssey. Her argument concludes with an argument that electronic
discourse needs to be retheorized in writing textbooks in a way that
accounts for memory and delivery as it exists in secondary orality.
She suggests that the discourses of real life and school life
partake of the same thing and therefore should be considered
the material for new pedagogies of writing that re-envision the roles
of the cannons of rhetoric.
Whitfield,
Charles L. Memory and Abuse: Remembering and Healing the Effects
of
Trauma. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health
Communications Inc., 1995.Mike
Sasso
Whitfield explains the processes of memory as well as the clinical and experiential implications of traumatic experiences and traumatic memory for adult survivors of traumatic childhood experiences and seeks to explain the resultant implications on adult memory. The author is carefully avoids re-traumatizing individuals but is interested in discovering why it is so hard to find real stories of childhood trauma. He explores false memory syndrome and accusations against a therapists role in constructing the memory of patients. Whitfield carefully and comprehensively provides information on memory and describes dissociation, repression, denial, and sorts out untrue from true memory, explains memory and traumatic stress, and provides a chapter on verifying and corroborating a memory. Although the book primarily deals with childhood sexual abuse it provides valuable information about the dubious operations of memory and the recall of past experiences.
Woolf,
Virginia. A Sketch of the Past. An Anatomy of
Memory. Ed. James McConkey.New
York: Oxford UP, 1996.Mike
Sasso
Woolfs
essay is presented as an experiment in memoir writing. The author
distinguishes between being and non-being in
the course of a life. To Woolf being occurs when life is consciously
lived out and savored consciously and remembered specifically.
Non-being comprises those hours of routine living that are not
remarkable or memorable at all.
Woolf
also discusses the liberation of her memories of her mother through
her composition of To The Lighthouse.She says, when it was
written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her
voice; I do not see her (325). Woolfs memoir is
punctuated by comments regarding the operation of her memory and her
creative process. She says I suppose that my memory supplies
what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening
independently, though I am really making it happen (318). This
essay is valuable to any mnemonic scholar who seeks to reconcile the
aesthetic presentation of memories in both fictive and
autobiographical literary genres because of the way Woolf mates
creativity with the expression of memories.
Yates,
Frances A.The Art of
Memory.The Anatomy of Memory: An
Anthology.Ed. James McConkey.New York: Oxford UP, 1996.9-17.Haivan
Hoang
Three major
descriptions of memory:
1.Cicero,
in De Oratore, gives story of Simonides and importance of
order for memory; claims that sense of sight is the strongest.
2.Quintilian
known for architectural mnemonic system; series of loci.
3.Ad C. Herennium, libri IV, (ca 86-82 BC)
said that there are two kinds of memory: artificial and natural.Yates explains that author gives a how-to to
students of rhetoric.Choose a
good loci that is not cluttered, paint it with distinct images, and
associate the images with things.Remember
the sequence.