The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film ed. by Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Eleanor Ty (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film ed. by Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Eleanor Ty Hannah McGregor Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, eds. The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2013. 342pp. $85.00. Contemporary media is obsessed with memory. Take, for example, the season three finale of bbc’s Sherlock, which culminates in a revelation about villainous media mogul Charles Augustus Magnussen. Whereas our hero has believed Magnussen to be in possession of vaults of information, accessed remotely through a Google-Glass-like digital interface, the show reveals that Magnussen in fact, like Sherlock himself, accesses his blackmail material via a mind palace—an ancient mnemonic device that organizes information by translating memory into spatial arrangements. The digital interface is disclosed as a visual metaphor for recollection rather than a mediation of information. This revelation mirrors the premise of the show itself, a contemporary adaptation that enthusiastically relocates Sherlock’s deductive skills in the world of contemporary media and technology while assuaging anxieties about the technologization of memory by insisting that cellphones and databases are only prosthetic enhancements of the human mind. In so doing it gestures toward the fundamentally intertwined concerns that shape The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film: the ever-increasing mediation of memory, the parallels between remediation and adaptation, and the tensions between technological and cultural memory. Together, these topics reinforce editors Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty’s claim that “there is nothing outside of memory” (24). This interdisciplinary essay collection, originating from a conference held at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2011, approaches memory studies through the lens of media theory to ask how memory may be constituted, or at least profoundly reshaped, by its mediations and remediations in literature, film, and television. How does our contemporary media ecology, in which the same narratives are recycled endlessly between multiple media, in which technology blurs the distinctions between reality and representation, shape what and how we remember? Despite the presentism that Kilbourn and Ty identify, in the introduction, as endemic to modern memory studies, the collected essays in fact span a range of texts and historical moments, from the propaganda posters of the First World War [End Page 224] (Sarah Henstra) to the Heritage Minutes’ production of nationalist nostalgia in the wake of the Quebec referendum (Erin Peters). Kilbourn and Ty’s introduction clearly states the collection’s allegiances: to poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and representation, to cultural theory, and to interdisciplinarity. In the process, the introduction offers a wide-ranging survey of the field, less systematic than evocative as it leaps from Bergson to Proust to Freud, stopping along the way at Deleuze, Hitchcock, St Augustine, and Matt Damon. It culminates in the claim that close engagement with specific texts and cultural objects is key to “an ethics of memory” capable of resisting the ideological deployment of memory as political propaganda. It is through this engagement, they assert, that “[t]he relentless and ineluctable technologization, exteriorization, and virtualizations of memory is mitigated by this model of memory as intersubjective, dialogical, social exchange” (25). The strongest essays in the collection are testaments to the ethical, political, and theoretical value of close engagement with cultural objects. Tanis MacDonald’s analysis of Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries reads poetry as a public archive of mourning and as a prosthetic for the violent rupture of the body and memory. She models how attentiveness to the fragmented and scattered dynamics of the text enacts a refusal to indulge in a fantasy of literature as undoing the violence of the past, concluding that “Brand’s exhumation of a non-existent ossuary is as imperative as it is impossible” (104). In a different register, Anders Bergstrom roots his argument that “cinema has shaped and continues to shape our conceptions of how memory operates” (197) in nuanced comparisons of contemporary memory films, taking into account genre conventions, techniques of representation, and modes of production and circulation. In the process, he convincingly demonstrates that the impact of media on conceptions of memory does not begin and end at the level of representation but...