Remediations of Memory

‘Remediations of Memory’ is a research grant I won in a competitive bid within the School of Foreign Languages, SJTU, to organize an international workshop on Memory Studies. This workshop took place on 8 June 2023, with a follow-up event on 9 June 2023 involving several PhD students from the School of Foreign Languages at SJTU. The event was in hybrid format, streaming on both Zoom and Tencent, and was attended by over 80 scholars from China and abroad.

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Program

10.00–11.00: Claudiu Turcuș, Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania: ‘The Cinematic Administration of the Distant Past: Commemorative Practices, Intermedial Memory, and the Historical Revisionism of Post-1989 Romanian Culture’

Claudiu Turcuș is Associate Professor, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Theatre and Film, and Vice-President of the Research Council at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. His research interests are in Eastern European Literature, Cinema and Criticism. His books include Norman Manea. Aesthetics as East Ethics (Peter Lang, 2016) and Împotriva memoriei. De la estetismul socialist la noul cinema românesc [Against Memory. From Socialist Aestheticism to New Romanian Cinema] (Eikon, 2017). He has published widely in journals such as Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Transylvanian Review, Canadian Slavonic Papers, as well as in edited volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, on topics related to the cultural memory of Socialism, the representation of post-communist transition and its intellectual history, and the ideology of New Romanian Cinema.

The Cinematic Administration of the Distant Past: Commemorative Practices, Intermedial Memory, and the Historical Revisionism of Post-1989 Romanian Culture

This presentation examines present-day reruns of 70’s Romanian historical films, their programming and publicity related to it, and their reception. It argues that, unintentionally, reruns act both as an instrument of historical revisionism and as a form of intermedial memory. It shows that the cinematic administration of the distant national past is still carried out by socialist-era films and it explains the causes of this predicament and its cultural effects. It reflects on how the process of rerunning works to neutralize their labelling as nationalist propaganda, a label that has been applied to these films by a large segment of Romania’s post-1989 cultural elite. The talk also briefly explores the marketing of two films: Dacii (The Dacians, 1966) and Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave, 1971), and highlights the commemorative practices brought into the present by these films. It uses contextual and genre arguments to explain why the commemorative practices proposed by socialist-era film appeal to present-day audiences and why their symbolism and ways of relating to the past are appropriated in contemporary Romanian popular culture.

11.00–12.00: Maxime Philippe, Shanghai University, China: ‘Proust’s Room: Memory and Its Stages’

Maxime Philippe is an Associate Professor in French literature at Shanghai University. His areas of interest include Francophone Literature, Theatre, and Critical Theory. His manuscript Artaud: From Art Therapy to a Therapy of Art examines Antonin Artaud’s reappropriation of art therapy in his performances. He has published about Artaud, Édouard Glissant and Proust in journals including L’Esprit Créateur, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, French Forum, French Australian Studies, South Central Review, The Dalhousie Review, and Word and Text. His new research project focuses on ecocriticism in Francophone world literature and, in particular, on the mangrove in Caribbean literature.

Proust’s Room: Memory and Its Stages

The room of the narrator is an essential space in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It is where the novel starts and it is where the narrator spends a great deal of time observing, recollecting and interpreting the outer world. It even becomes a metaphor for consciousness. Proust himself spent much of his life bedridden because of his asthma, writing and receiving visitors in his bedroom. Hence, Proust’s room became an object of fascination for his readers. In museums and exhibitions dedicated to Proust and his work, there have been multiple attempts at staging this space. I will discuss these installations and compare them with both their fictional and historical counterparts, showing how curators and spectators as readers negotiate the relationship between fiction and reality. Furthermore, such a critical perspective helps us think the special status of Proust’s work in literary history in terms of autofiction. Finally, I will interrogate how we (re-)mediate memory and how memory is a stage, has to be staged.

13.30–14.30: Laurent Milesi, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China: ‘The Remediation of (Post-)Humanities’

Laurent Milesi is Tenured Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University. His main areas of expertise include James Joyce and related aspects of modernism, 20^th-century American poetry, postmodernism, critical and cultural theory (especially poststructuralism, the work of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, posthumanism), French autofiction (the work of Chloé Delaume), and game studies. His edited collection, James Joyce and the Difference of Language, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. He has translated several works by Jacques Derrida: (with Stefan Herbrechter) H. C. for Life, That Is to Say… (Stanford University Press, 2006), Thinking out of Sight: Writings on the Arts of the Visible (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and by Hélène Cixous: Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett (Polity, 2010), Philippines (Polity, 2011), Tomb(e) (Seagull Books, 2014). He is one of the general editors of the ‘Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics’ book series at Rowman & Littlefield International, where he has co-edited Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (2017).

The Remediation of (Post-)Humanities

‘Humanity does not exist at all yet or it barely exists.’ French historical figure Jean Jaurès’s statement, famously echoed by Jacques Derrida, then by Bernard Stiegler, will provide a fittingly provocative starting point for my reflections on the present condition and future of the ‘humanities’, envisaged both as the pluralization of what differentiates ‘us’ from other species and the academic implementation of programs (as well as the philosophical questioning) in the name of humanism. This presentation will investigate the condition of the humanities in the digital age as always already that of the ‘posthumanities’. The first part will discuss the impact of the Derridean deconstruction of the sign as technological ‘trace’ as an antecedent to Stiegler’s conception, from his first volume of Technics and Time onwards, of humanity as indissociable from an exteriorizing technicity which gave rise to a third kind of memory, or ‘epiphylogenetic’ memory. The second part will analyze Stiegler’s notion of ‘pharmacology’, his diagnostic of the enslavement of contemporary homo technicus through tele-technologies and his pragmatic search for socio-political, cultural and educational remedies. Inflecting Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation’, the third part will envisage tomorrow’s ‘remedial’ (post)humanities, adducing as precursor examples a couple of creative practitioners (Mark Taylor and Gregory Ulmer) and emphasizing the rich potential of videogames in such a ‘re(-)creative’ process.

14.30–15.30: Feng Li, Shanghai International Studies University, China: ‘Preserving Memories through False History: Memories in Narratives of Alternate History’

Feng Li (Frank LEE) is Professor of English Language and Literature at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), a Research Fellow in SISU’s Institute of Jewish Studies, and “Zhi Yuan Distinguished Scholar”. Before moving to SISU, he worked at Shanghai University of Finance & Economics (as Deputy Dean of the School of Foreign Studies), Columbia University (as Fulbright Research Scholar), and the State University of New York at Albany (as Visiting Professor). His major areas of interest include British and American literature (especially alternate history, the cross-disciplinary study of literature and business culture), modern Jewish literature, and Western critical theories. He is the author of Economic Contexts and Business Culture in 20-^th Century American Literature (2020), Histories that Never Happened: A Study of Contemporary American Alternate History Fictions (forthcoming), and the translator of works by George Orwell, W. Somerset Maugham and Linda Hutcheon, among others.

Preserving Memories through False History: Memories in Narratives of Alternate History

History is essentially a kind of human memory which is normally preserved in historical files and archives as ‘true history’ or objective facts. However, alternate history, a kind of ‘false history’ whose setting deviates from the known track, contains a lot of historical memories as well. In fact, an alternate history narrative, as both a research method and a literary genre, can effectively reflect its author’s personal memory and his/her contemporaries’ collective memories as part of the Zeitgeist, though this reflection is achieved from the opposite perspective (i.e. scenarios of ‘what could have been otherwise’). This presentation first discusses the role of alternate history in preserving historical memory, then, with case studies of some alternate history fictions, explores the way human memories are represented and how personal/collective memories are reflected through the work. The aim is to create dialogues between memory studies and historical inquiries, and therefore broaden the horizon of both disciplines. Besides, this may contribute new perspectives to the research of alternate history as an important subgenre in literary criticism.

15.45–16.45: Ivan Callus, University of Malta (online): ‘Literature’s Postprint Elsewheres: Some Reflections on the Claimed State of Play’

Ivan Callus is Professor of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature and in literary criticism. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in the areas of contemporary fiction, comparative literature, literary theory and posthumanism. Among the volumes he has co-edited are European Posthumanism (with Stefan Herbrechter and Manuela Rossini; Routledge, 2016), Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy (with James Corby and Gloria Lauri-Lucente; Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Posthumanist Shakespeares (with Stefan Herbrechter Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Cy-Borges: Memories of Posthumanism in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges (with Stefan Herbrechter; Bucknell University Press, 2009), Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)resistibility of Theory (with Stefan Herbrechter; Bucknell University Press, 2004) and Post-Theory/Culture/Criticism (with Stefan Herbrechter; Rodopi, 2004). He is one of the founding Editors of the Genealogy of the Posthuman project (criticalposthumanism.net) and (with James Corby) of CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary (Edinburgh University Press). His most recently published work includes the co-edited Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (Palgrave, 2022), as well as book chapters on film and posthumanism, the poetics of tone and the genre of the newspaper column. His most recent research, leading to forthcoming publications, includes work on autothanatography, on literature and posthumanism, and on the recent writing of Julian Barnes.

Literature’s Postprint Elsewheres: Some Reflections on the Claimed State of Play

Does anyone remember literature? Or, for that matter, ‘literariness’, a recurrent interest of poststructuralist critique that is now arguably viewable in retrospect as a last hurrah for a certain understanding of the literary that this paper recalls and characterises? The move serves as a preamble for consideration of two trends. The first has a number of critics and theorists speaking about postprint literature and culture, as N. Katherine Hayles does; and about literature’s elsewheres, as Annette Gibson does; and also about the post-literary, as studied in the journal CounterText (which the author of this paper co-edits). To these perceptions, the remediation of literature and transformations by contemporary affordances is… taken as read. The second trend, contrarily, is set by mainstream readerships, who, crucially, remain quite taken with forms and platforms of literature that might be seen as enduringly non-remediated. This paper considers these trends in the context of the author’s recently published ‘Literature and Posthumanism’, a book chapter in the two-volume Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, and with reference to recent and forthcoming work in CounterText on ideas concerning the post-literary and the claims made for literature’s elsewheres. The aim is to offer some reflections on the claimed state of play within literature’s purported transformations in the present.

16.45–17.45: Arleen Ionescu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University: ‘Layers of Memory in Video-Games: Attentat 1942, A Case Study on Witnessing’

Arleen Ionescu is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her major research interests are in the fields of Modernist prose, Critical Theory, Memory Studies, Holocaust and Trauma Studies. Her work on James Joyce and related aspects of Modernism, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Beckett as well as on various aspects of historical trauma has appeared in reputed academic journals such as James Joyce Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, Memory Studies, Oxford Literary Review, Parallax, Paragraph, Partial Answers, Joyce Studies Annual, SLOVO, and Style. She is joint Editor-in-Chief (with Laurent Milesi) of Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (Peter Lang, 2014) and The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (Palgrave, 2017). She co-edited, with Maria Margaroni, Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020). At present she is working on a research project on the Shanghai Ghetto.

Layers of Memory in Video-Games: Attentat 1942, A Case Study on Witnessing

Dealing with affect theory and immersive experiences that can arouse players’ empathy, this paper presents the video game Attentat 1942 (Charles Games, 2017) and examines the way memory operates and how the player adds layers of memory in order to find out the truth about his/her grandfather’s past. Using trauma studies (Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Dori Laub, Thomas Trezize, among others), and demonstrating why and how the players engage, even if implicitly, with traumatic historical material, it focuses on the ethical choices that need to be made in-game in order to help the grandfather work through the wounds of his past. Analyzing one of the most sensitive explorations of World War Two and its aftermath to date in the videogame industry, the paper aims to demonstrate that the success of Attentat 1942 lies in gamer agency centring on the witness’s perspective.

17.45–18.00: Closing remarks, with the participation of Zengjing Li (PhD student), Ling Chen (PhD student), Zihao Liu (PhD student), Xiaoqi Huang (MA student).