Introduction

Abstract

AbstractApart from self-image and ancestry origins, our memories—our reinterpretations of past experiences, cultural contexts, and national his-stories—frame our identity and constitute our subjective selfhood. Using this idea as a starting point, the book attempts to show how American literary modernism and postmodernism interconnect memory and identity, what approaches to memory and identity modernists and postmodernists utilize in their works, and if, and how, the intertwining of memory and identity has been related to the dominant socio-cultural trends in the United States of a particular decade or era and informed by specific historical contexts elsewhere in the world. Impacted by turbulent social, political, and cultural changes and upheavals on a regional, national, and global scale, the identity formation in the modern era was mostly bound to the retrieval of individual (episodic and autobiographical) and shared (collective and cultural) memories and mediated through sensory, material, and historical cues. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Williams explored the peculiarities of individual and shared memory retrieval processes, turning recollections into a traumatic memory of individual and collective identity. In the age of globalization and pervasive technological mediation, both memory and identity are constituted through the experiences of immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity, and positioning, revealing fragmented, mediated, fluid, and unstable subjects. Pynchon, Coover, and Safran Foer observed these dynamics and depicted memory as contingent, process-dependent, and constructed, inclined to both official amnesia and the indoctrinated and re-mediated remembrance (in service of implicit political agendas); and characterized identity as precarious and unsettled, process or context-dependent phenomena.KeywordsModernismPostmodernismMemoryIidentityMemory retrievalAmerican literature