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

Abstract

Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, eds. The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory Literature and Film. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Pp. 355. $85 CAD. In The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory Literature and Film, Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty locate their methodological approach in concepts or processes of memory, mediation, and (26). Their approach highlights is not fixed (the flashbulb memories feature so strongly popular discourse and film), but something gets constituted, legitimized, 'naturalized,' replicated, and reproduced narrative or visual (26). Understanding remediation as referring to both mediation and its (18), Kilbourn and Ty draw attention to how changes not just repetition but also writers' and artists' use. Their concept of extends beyond contemporary forms such as multimedia and twenty-first-century cinema, for included this collection of fifteen essays are pieces on construction of female mourning World War One, writing Gertrude Stein, fiction of W. G. Sebald, Dionne Brand's Ossuaries, Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo, life-writing about Holocaust, and Neil M. Gunn's autobiography The Atom of Delight. While several contributors testify ironically to complex terrain of studies when they make competing claims regarding centrality of their area of research to these studies--for example, K. J. Keir on autobiography, Anders Bergstrom on cinema, and Kate Warren on re-enactments--what is most valuable collection is how individual essays challenge theoretical pieties. Exemplary here is Stefan Sereda's reading of cinema of simulation's potential to challenge Jean Baudrillard's and Fredric Jameson's conclusions regarding treatment of history late capitalist film. Defining cinema of simulation as self-consciously provoke intersections among fiction, history, and media (227), Sereda uses Steven Soderbergh's The Good German and Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds to demonstrate how cinema of simulation challenge or reinforce hegemonic political discourses contemporary moment (229). Fidelity such films operates two ways films that are unfaithful to historical record often display an high level of fidelity to manner which history has been recorded (234); is, our memories of World War Two are inseparable from our memories of watching Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman film Casablanca. According to Sereda, best films this mode thus move beyond prosthetic (Alison Landsberg's term for memories are created our experience of popular culture representations) to create form of post-prosthetic memory (244). What Landsberg's theory of prosthetic has common with Marianne Hirsch's theory of and Cathy Caruth's transmission theory of trauma is a notion of raises issues of appropriation. Such issues are central to many of volume's strongest contributions. Examining virtues and shortcomings of Hirsch's concept of postmemory (52), Kathy Behrendt critiques Hirsch's recently expanded concept of for its intimation post-rememberer can herself live anything resembling what victims lived through (55). She makes a good case for ethical quagmire results when concept of expands beyond close family relatives of rememberer, and even here, we might ask what kind of those close family relatives can possibly experience. Focusing on Hirsch's view of Sebald as a postmemorial writer, Behrendt rightly points out it is the absence of is so often at heart of [Sebald's] stories (65). It is precisely by eschewing imaginative empathy Sebald escapes accusations of appropriation (56). …