The lonely figure

Abstract

This essay aims to explore how the voice of memory and its rich resonance in Ana Menéndez’s eponymous short story “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” in her collection of that name can be read for and heard. Memory choreographs its discourse, and reading the figurations and figures that emerge makes visible the contours of what André Aciman has called the exile’s “compulsive retrospection”. The theoretical framework for these explorations and excavations is based on the approaches that tropology, Bakhtin’s conception of architectonics and cognitive linguistics take to figuration, the construction of memory, and orientation.