Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images by Anastasia Ulanowicz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images by Anastasia Ulanowicz Hamida Bosmajian (bio) Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images, by Anastasia Ulanowicz. New York: Routledge, 2013. The energy that drives Anastasia Ulanowicz’s Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images are the ghost images that haunt her, palimpsests of memories overheard and gathered as she listened to her elders as a child (xi). Although she interprets only five narratives of children’s literature, “case studies” she calls them, [End Page 285] her range and scope sweep wide. There are times the reader may fear she is wandering too far down a critical side path, but then she always hooks up seamlessly with her main argument and the reader concedes: “Aha, you know where you are going.” Ulanowicz accepts Samantha Power’s haunting definition of the twentieth century as “the age of genocide”(3). Soon there will be only second-generation memory narratives, even when a narrator imagines being an eyewitness. Ulanowicz’s focus is timely and the questions she raises in her well-researched analogical and associative discussions contribute in major ways to future explorations, for there will be—there are already—third-generation receivers of memory. “If ‘children’s literature of atrocity’ is a relatively new phenomenon,” she asks, “then how might its development coincide with equally newly emerging theories of memory?” (4). The scholars she consults are, however, not those who explore the cognitive and neurological or even the psychological development of the child faculty of memory; rather, they are in the humanist tradition of philosophy and the social sciences. Like Jonas in Lowry’s The Giver, Ulanowicz listens respectfully to her “elders” who inspire her in her “case studies” as she endeavors to effect a new direction in how we talk when we talk about narratives of atrocity at this juncture of our cultural history. Forgetting is the “shadowy twin”(31) of remembering. We want and we need to forget—and we will forget. Forgetting may be our undoing or our survival. Remembering demands a tremendous and often painful effort, spurred by ethical impulses and by critical consciousness, especially where disaster and trauma are at stake. All second-generation memory is collective, but second-generation memory receivers are aware that, in one way or another, they are shaped by the first generation. In her helpful introduction Ulanowicz points out that receivers of that context can never replicate the first generation’s traumatic experiences and reactions, but they can reimagine and reshape them, even incorporate them “as if [their] life depended on it—because, in a sense it does” (15). There is an inherent ethical, if not radically revolutionary inclination in second-generation memory, though Ulanowicz, while officially emphasizing it, doubts its actualization repeatedly (21–23). Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is the framing intellectual influence for this study, especially his writings about children during the 1920s and 1930s. He saw the child’s imaginative expressiveness, unconventionality, and ability to yoke disparate images as possessing not only critical but also radically revolutionary potential. Ulanowicz, to put it [End Page 286] simply, hopes that under the right circumstances the child listener’s or reader’s critical consciousness is stimulated to ask questions and therewith begin the process of change that may eventually be accepted by the collective will of the community. Though the last Armenian genocide had occurred during the Great War, Benjamin’s writings were completed before the age of atrocities began in Europe and his influence, belated as it is in the European and American context, cannot be considered as an emerging theory of memory. Furthermore, Ulanowicz does not acknowledge the potential propaganda value of Benjamin’s observations and theories. As long as children knew which side was “the right side,” German fascism and Soviet communism encouraged and radicalized children to question and critique. There is a rather romantic projection of the child’s primary impulses and spontaneity in Benjamin’s writing on this subject that Ulanowicz modifies. She sees the child, protagonist or reader, empathetically, critically, and creatively active as she or he absorbs and reenvisions memories conveyed by witness-survivors or by cultural media...