Memory - Remembering - Forgetting

At the turn of the millennium, memory has emerged as one of the key notions of the contemporary paradigm. This volume explores its involvement in the conceptualisation of culture as well as its underlying presence in literature and philosophy. Memory and its Other - forgetfulness - are approached from a variety of perspectives: in terms of past and present, finite and infinite; in the context of autobiography; with reference to the dichotomies of body/language and masculine/feminine; or as a recomposition or translation of the past experience. The issues discussed by individual papers include such diverse questions as the concept of memory as a form of interpretation, the impasse of subjective identity, the problem of the claim to immortality in Shakespeare's sonnets, the dialectic of memory and forgetting in "Cymbeline" and "Pericles," or the interrelations between time and various modes of memory in the poetry of Paul Celan.