Life Writing: Latvian Poet Veronika Strēlerte

This book looks at psychologists' present understanding of the nature of memory, especially recollections of childhood, and how, in cases of so-called ‘recovered memories’, the unreliability and flexibility of memory has led to tragic consequences, destroying the lives of whole families. All of us have memories of childhood — that special trip to the fair, or impressions, such as dappled sunlight through rustling leaves seen from the pram. Some people firmly believe that they can recall scenes from the time they were babies. But what does science tell us about the nature of memory, and memories of childhood? In the first part of this book, the book begins with examples collected from many interviews of earliest memories, and goes on to look at psychologists' and neuroscientists' understanding of memory. It becomes clear that, whatever individuals might claim, memories of the first two years or so of our lives are simply not accessible to us, while later memories are fragile, yielding to suggestion and our inclination towards a neat story. All too often, our ‘memory’ of an event arises from what we have been told by a relative. The book then turns to darker territory. A casual remark by a child at a nursery leads to detailed and suggestive questioning of a number of children, resulting in the arrest of a teacher accused of child abuse. She was subsequently released. Some patients with eating and mood disorders undergoing therapy have come to believe, or have been led to believe by the therapist, that their problems stem from being sexually abused as a child — memories allegedly repressed and only ‘recovered’ under the guidance of the therapist. Such claims have again resulted in wrongful arrest, subsequently overturned, though the damage done to the families is irreparable.

Este trabalho busca refletir sobre a relacao entre memoria, midia e identidade social. Em primeiro lugar, apresentamos uma discussao sobre os conceitos de memoria e identidade. Buscamos, assim, mostrar como ambas sao constituidas por processos interativos e dinâmicos, praticas discursivas e estrategias narrativas. Por fim, relacionamos memoria e identidade com o campo da midia, entendida como uma agencia fundamental nos processos de producao desses dois conceitos.

The concepts of childhood and memory are interrelated. Memories of childhood are often deployed in popular discussions regarding understandings of what it means to be a child and the changing status of childhood in society. For example, both nostalgic and romanticized memories of the past and memories of trauma and abuse are evoked in assumptions of lost childhood innocence or the eroding of childhood as a time of freedom in contemporary society. Memories of childhood therefore not only shed light on the past, but also present individual and social preoccupations in terms of what is remembered (or forgotten) and how. While the study of adults’ memories of childhood, such as through memoirs and life history interviews, is well established, particularly in historical and cultural studies, it is only more recently that outside of developmental psychology, memory in childhood has emerged as a more significant research focus. Memory in childhood explores the role of children as memory-makers, holders, preservers, and translators, in relation to their own memories and also to the memories of others, whether intergenerational familial memories or wider public or collective memory, such as of conflict, colonialism, or environmental degradation. Here, the majority of research is interdisciplinary, situated at the intersection between memory studies and childhood studies with a focus on memory as an embodied, social, material, and political phenomenon and the ways in which memory shapes individual and collective actions, identities, and narratives. How the figure of the child is mobilized, by whom, and for what purposes are central questions in the politics of memory, particularly representations of children and childhood in memorials, narratives of nation-building, and educational initiatives. Studies of memory and childhood also raise ethical and methodological questions. Which children are remembered and how? Do adults’ memories of childhood have value in understanding childhood in the present? What methods can be used to explore the complexities, dynamics, and often intangible forms of memory in childhood, and what are the ethical implications involved? Considerations of memory and childhood are of interest not only to scholars in the fields of memory studies, childhood studies, and education, but also to practitioners in educational, museum, and cultural heritage sectors.

The Human Metaphysical Identity and the Identitary Functions of Sensitive Memory in the Thomistic Anthropology. The article aims to recover – in the context in which the concepts of memory and identity are approached, most often, in the Eastern European cultural space, in terms of their collective dimension – their original anthropological meanings, through the prism of Aquinas's thought. In this thematic direction, the ontological identity of the human being is analyzed with priority, starting from the Aristotelian solutions to the problem of identity, after which the Thomistic conception of sensitive and intellectual memory is effectively debated, including the subsistence of the latter in the separate soul post mortem. Keywords: identity, memory, individuality, soul, sensitive, intellective, personal, psychological, being

How can we go beyond historically constructed gender differences, as we read literary genres in the contemporary Irish context? In order to start finding responses to these questions, we aim at looking into how selves are constructed and identities represented as we read Celia de Fréine’s works. Indeed, concepts of identity in postmodernity, represented selves and literary genres, particularly related to the recent Irish literary context are fundamental points of convergence in the understanding of feminisms and literature today. Therefore, this article intends to show how fixed concepts of gender identity and literary genres are, in fact, unstable in contemporaneity. The paralleled, theoretical notions (of gender and genres) matter in the Irish context, because, apart from a few exceptions, women have been excluded from the public literary scene and many of the poets that appeared after the 1970’s account for their condition as women in a patriarchal society. Moreover, it matters due to the proximity of both cases’ unstable condition in our times.Keywords: Contemporary Irish poetry; literary genres; gender; contemporaneity.

Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with verbal working memory and vocabulary abilities. A picture-elicited narrative task was employed. Sixty Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-5 years were asked to tell a story according to the book Frog, Where Are You? The pausing types and positions in narratives were coded and analyzed. Additionally, children's verbal working memory and vocabulary were measured. The results showed that 4- to 5-year-old children prefer to use silent pauses and tend to produce pauses within clauses. The total frequency of pausing decreases with age and shows a significant gender difference. Girls prefer to use within-clause pauses, whereas boys prefer to use between-clause pauses. More importantly, children's pausing frequency is closely associated with their verbal working memory and vocabulary, in which working memory plays a more important role. This study is a first-step exploration of pausing strategies in 4- to 5-year-old Chinese children's narratives. The developmental characteristics of pausing strategies shown in typically developing children serve as a crucial reference for interventions for children with language deficits.

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn Ryan C. McIlhenny (bio) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 222 pp. Notes and index. $18.95. It seems that no other branch of historical study is as buoyant as intellectual history. There have been dips in terms of its popularity, especially in relation to what may be the sexier developments within cultural studies, but intellectual history consistently reappears to provide critical assessment not only of historical changes but also changes in the methods of historical research. In the generation after Merle Curti, Perry Miller, or Henry Commager, intellectual history went through a revival in the late 1970s, due in no insignificant way to the Wingspread Conference of 1977, a gathering of historians including Paul Conkin, John Higham, Gordon Wood, David Hollinger, Dorothy Ross, Henry May, and Thomas Bender. Wingspread played an important role in joining older approaches to intellectual history with new creative discoveries within the humanities, breathing new life into this mode of historical writing. Distinct from the history of ideas and the history of philosophy, intellectual historians, according to Peter Gordon, see ideas as “historically conditioned” and thereby “best understood within some larger context, whether it be the context of social struggle and institutional change, intellectual biography (individual or collective), or some larger context of cultural or linguistic dispositions (now often called ‘discourses’).”1 Aware of the historical conditions from which ideas emerge—not to mention, as Daniel Wickberg does in American Labyrinth (2018), the contingency of contexts—intellectual historians are also cognizant of how such contingencies shape the way that they understand the methods of their own craft. Disciplines across the intellectual spectrum have been influenced by developments in cultural studies. Scholars—not just those in the humanities or social sciences, but also in the hard sciences—have demonstrated greater historical awareness, becoming increasingly wary of presenting ideas as normative or static. Social history steeped in the turbid currents of the 1960s, emphasizing long-ignored marginalized groups, was followed almost immediately by cultural history, which considered at a deeper philosophical level the social identities created through textual discourse. The [End Page 165] attendees at Wingspread, as well as those who helped author the collection of essays in New Directions in Intellectual History (1979), engaged the messiness of ideas, especially those articulated by iconoclastic intellectuals like Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. The cultural presupposes the social and thus edges ever closer to the philosophical. Cultural historians are often reluctant to attribute causation to ideas, but Ratner-Rosenhagen and others would argue that causation can be the result of ideas, including cultural ones related to identity. Consequently, the cultural, especially in regard to ideas, has provided fodder for intellectual historians, since both are “invested in decoding meaning,” write Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman in American Labyrinth (2018), and thus “interested in language as a historical source.”2 For James Livingston, cultural change “is the groundwork of intellectual innovation.”3 Benjamin Alpers likewise suggests that cultural history has had an important impact on “intellectual historical practice” and that cultural and intellectual history should be viewed “as a single subfield.”4 Since the 1980s, cultural history has emphasized the pluralistic and unintended happenings from below and from the periphery, challenging first-principles foundationalism, eschewing any form of unidirectional history—whether top-down, bottom-up, or side-to-side (core-periphery)—and welcoming the ongoing creations of and negotiations within these spaces. The revolt of cultural scholars against simplistic bifurcations has led to an acceptance of ideas as contingent, inherently unstable, yet rich with possibilities, revitalizing in turn a dialectical method without a rigid teleology. Since Wingspread, contemporary intellectual historians have come to appreciate such dynamism, expanding interpretive boundaries and injecting the field with new and relevant insights. Following the success of American Nietzsche (2011), Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America embraces the creative possibilities of intellectual history, making the multiple worlds of ideas more palatable for readers. Daniel Rodgers, a leading figure among contemporary intellectual historians, identifies movement “as a central motif in intellectual history,” comparing it to a kind of “borderlands history.”5 Ratner-Rosenhagen agrees...

This article explores the concept of children's autobiographical memory that is evident from the age of four onwards. Recent findings on the construction of memories, the development of narrative ability and the impact of culture on memory are discussed in relation to an exploratory study of children's earliest memories. Although no conclusion could be made as to whether children's memories are co-constructed or spontaneous, findings show that earliest memories were of atypical events that had occurred in the child's life. Implications for learning and teaching of young children are included.

Laps(epõlv) 19. sajandi teise poole Eestis omaelulooliste tekstide näitel. Child(hood) in 19th Century Estonia: a Study of Autobiographical Texts

This chapter traces the theme of exile in the six main preserved Latin epics and and to show how it illustrates and promotes the central concerns of each of the poems. The poems are Vergil's Aeneid , Ovid's Metamorphoses , Lucan's De Bello Civili , Silius' Punica , Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica and Statius' Thebaid . It illustrates how each poem uses this element for its own particular purposes as well as demonstrating that such a dramatic idea has a natural place in the most elevated of literary genres. Though the different poems make varied use of the motif outside their responses to the Vergilian national or foundational exile, the emotional power of the theme of exile is continually evident. Thus the theme of exile contributes much to the grand passions and grand moralising of Latin epic as well as constituting a key element in its grand master plots. Keywords: Aeneid ; exile; ktistic aspect of exile; Latin epics; Ovid's Metamorphoses ; Tomis

Continuity in attachment classification from infancy to late adolescence was examined and related to autobiographical memories of childhood, divorce, and maladjustment. Eighty-four White middle-class children (48 girls) were seen in a modified Strange Situation at 12 months and given the Adult Attachment Interview at 18 years. In addition, data were collected on 13-year-olds' childhood recollections as well as adolescent, mother, and teacher ratings of maladjustment at 13 and 18 years of age. Divorce status of parents also was obtained. Results indicated no continuity in attachment classification from 1 to 18 years of age and no relation between infant attachment status and adolescent maladjustment. Divorce was related to 13-year-olds' childhood recollections as well as to insecure attachment status at 18 years. Eighteen-year-olds with insecure attachment classification were more likely to rate themselves as maladjusted. The results support the idea of attachment as an evolving representation dependent upon the nature of the family environment as indexed by divorce.

continue the quality of terrifying tales presented while also giving us a better look at the world of horror in Asia, Africa, and eastern Europe. Sean Guynes Michigan State University Daniel Mendelsohn Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press. 2020. 128 pages. THIS UNIQUE BOOK by memoirist and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn traces with deep learning and imagination the relation between stories and the world. It revolves, on first glance, around groups of threes. Its three chapters consider the works of three unlikely literary companions: Erich Auerbach , François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald. All three were exiles, and all three considered or reflected in their greatly varying works questions about narrative, fiction, and reality—and the relation of all three to one another. As the reader discovers, though, other authors and books also play profound roles in Mendelsohn’s meditations: his own widely admired memoirs, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic; Homer’s Odyssey; Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; and the Turkish translation of Fénelon’s Télémaque, by Kamil Pasha, to mention just a few. All are carefully examined, thoroughly or briefly , in Mendelsohn’s subtle consideration of how narrative works and how it is related to reality. Mendelsohn is especially interested in how his three main authors deploy or discuss a number of challenging narrative strategies—elaborate digressions and attention to peripheral matters crucially among them—and how those strategies both serve and challenge their representations of the world. Mendelsohn is intensely aware, though, of how differently these sundry authors regard these narrative strategies. What the reader senses early on, and what gradually becomes an explicit theme of Mendelsohn’s book, is the divide between the “optimists,” for whom narrative strategies—no matter how digressive and seemingly aimless— lead to coherence and unity, and the “pessimists ,” for whom those same strategies lead to disorientation and dead ends. Sebald exemplifies this pessimistic strain most thoroughly, as opposed to the optimist Homer. “Like Homer,” Mendelsohn concludes , ”Sebald uses ring composition to great effect. But unlike the narrative rings, circles, digressions, and wandering that we What rights and responsibilities does “being from” a place saddle a person with? Ali, who has called many places home, asks: What does it mean to have a point of origin, a community to belong to, or several? With richly layered questions about place, home, colonialism, complicity, indigenous sovereignty, and his own activism and childhood memories in mind, Ali emailed Chief Cathy Merrick. He wanted to learn more about the daily social and environmental issues facing Cross Lake and told Merrick he’d grown up in Jenpeg. Her email back was brief but generous: “It is wonderful that you would reflect on your childhood. You are more than welcome to visit our Nation.” Shortly thereafter, he boarded a plane and flew north. Northern Light is a journey story that troubles the maxim “You can never go home again.” Ali does go home, but that home, the town of Jenpeg, is gone to boreal forests growing back in the glow of Manitoba Hydro. He goes home to humble himself before the Pimicikamak community on whose ancestral lands he’d lived, unbeknownst to him, as a child. Ali returns to listen and be in dialogue with a community that has long called the waterways of the Nelson River their home. He returns to look closer and more tenderly at a place that is and is not familiar, that does and does not belong to him. His journey to Cross Lake is full of connections, burgeoning friendships, late-night hockey games, brunches honoring mothers, and school visits. Ali is a kind and attentive listener, curious , always a warm presence on the page. Always eager for more. What do we each owe to the places we call home, and what can we give back to them, and to each other? Ali’s ethical imaginary is as finely honed and illuminating as his prose. “We belong to the places of our earliest griefs, belong to where we left our dead, and belong to places where...

In accordance with attachment theory, the present study investigates whether internal working models of attachment mediated the association between childhood memories and satisfaction about life in adulthood. A convenient sample of 437 participants completed questionnaires assessing a broad range of childhood memories, working models of attachment and life satisfaction. After controlling for demographics, relational status and living condition, Baron and Kenny's mediation criteria were met for the association between memories about childhood, adult attachment and life satisfaction. That is, family warmth and harmony and parental support were associated with attachment security while parental rejection and adverse childhood events (e.g., abuse, parental psychopathology) were associated with an insecure attachment style. More securely attached individuals were in turn more satisfied about their current life than insecurely attached individuals. Sobel test confirmed these findings. These finding are in accordance with attachment theory and highlight the importance of this theory for understanding how early childhood experiences may impact adult life.

Reviewed by: Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children’s Stories and Childhood Memories Diana Arlene Chlebek (bio) Alida Allison, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children’s Stories and Childhood Memories. New York: Twayne, 1996. In the last chapter of her book, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children’s Stories and Childhood Memories, Alida Allison explains the universal appeal of his writing by quoting from the author’s own description of his paradoxical and marginal status as a creative man, “What It Takes To Be a Jewish Writer”: “The creative writer must have deep roots in his milieu, but he must not be entirely of it. . . . The true artist is simultaneously a child of his people, and a stepchild . . .” (135). Allison’s critique focuses on this perspective of Singer as a writer of double vision through the lens of his stories for the young. The premise of her book is that there is an inextricable link between Singer’s autobiography, both in the adult and juvenile versions, and this phase of his writing career. She observes that the author’s testament of his childhood coincides with the onset of his productive period as a children’s writer quite late in his life. The frame of her biographical-critical approach is itself braced by one of Singer’s most passionate and persistent beliefs about the need for specificity in literature, that “. . . there is no literature without roots. . . . The more a writer is rooted in his environment, the more he is understood by all people; the more national he is, the more international he becomes . . .” (1). The first chapter appropriately begins with the roots of Singer’s psychic and writing life in an analysis of A Day of Pleasure, his autobiography for juveniles that stresses those unique aspects of both his Jewish heritage and his own inheritance of his family’s emotional and intellectual outlook that made Singer a born storyteller. In this regard Allison’s account of Singer’s childhood and the stories he spun from his early life contributes a unique perspective toward a comprehension of his work. She underscores the orality of Singer’s art and its rootedness in Jewish and Yiddish culture, particularly its folkloric basis. There is a passing reference to Roderick McGillis’s important study on the loss of orality in the modern world in the context of children’s poetry. A more extensive treatment of the theoretical underpinnings of this topic would have been helpful here, particularly in relation to Singer’s exploitation of the strategies of oral narrative that are the common structural links between his children’s stories and both the folklore and daily tales of shtetl life he absorbed as a child. [End Page 135] The fact that all of Singer’s works for children have been initially published as translated works with the author’s contribution as both co-translator and co-editor is an especially intriguing aspect of the creative process in his writing. Toward this analysis Allison has incorporated valuable new material hitherto untapped, both through interviews with Elizabeth Shub, Singer’s translator and editor, and through the revelation of his manuscripts of the children’s stories that both he and Shub reworked extensively. Singer has stressed that humor and poetry are virtually untranslatable from one language to another, especially from a highly dramatic idiom like Yiddish to a leaner and more logical one like English (“Translating” 111). However, in her explication of Singer’s shlemiel and Chelm stories, Allison presents an incisive analysis of how, during the process of Singer’s and Shub’s co-translation and co-editing, rearranged structural elements in the narratives and a judicious choice of English vocabulary manage to convey much of the original punch of the Yiddish jokes and exaggerations about Singer’s fools. Allison’s overall approach to the body of Singer’s writing for children is through a breakdown by chronology and format. Several of her chapters focus, in order of publication, on his major collections, such as Zlateh the Goat and When the Shlemiel Went to Warsaw; a later chapter analyzes as a group Singer’s single-story and picture books. This categorization is helpful in her discussion of the formal aspects of each collection of...

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book. Outside the field of ancient history, anthropologists have for several decades contemplated the idea that different cultures have their own forms of historical representation. These ideas are useful for the study of Italy, where scholarship to date has largely focused on history as it was practiced by Romans and Western Greeks. A broader understanding of “historical culture” presents an opportunity to connect the practices of those peoples with others across the Italian Peninsula. This concept also helps us bridge the longstanding but largely artificial academic divide between archaeology and history as two fields jointly interested in reconstructing past societies. This desire to talk about historical culture across media in fact finds good pedigree in ancient conceptions of monumenta in both Roman and non-Roman cultures as a term describing commemorative practices across different media. We thus confront the possibility of a “deep” or more temporally extensive study of history-making, one that follows human interests in their past backward into periods where evidence starts to look different but can be seen to speak to similar social practices. The chapter also argues that it is precisely this social aspect of historical culture that makes it preferable to the more labile and less useful concept of memory. After theorizing historical culture in these ways, the chapter lays out the structure of the book.