Narratives Of Remembrance Research Articles

‘Ever in our Thoughts’: Remembering Midland Men

The contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, narratives of early twentieth-century remembrance are explored in this article. Individual personal inscriptions to Midlands men in the cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission around the Ypres Salient are set against the prevailing motifs of remembrance as defined by Leicester’s high-profile memorials to the South African War and the First World War. This comparison sets out to explore the extent to which public memorials directed and reflected the expressions of the next-of-kin, and discovers that the public narrative of remembrance was not as straightforward as it was sometimes presented.

Trauma, (Mis)Perception and Memory in Uwem Akpan's ‘Fattening for Gabon’

It is a generally accepted principle in contemporary poststructuralist literary studies that language can only ever partially succeed in signifying that which it purports to signify. Where the profoundly dislocating experience of trauma is concerned, language loses even this partial success, and the victim of psychic violence is forced to resort to silence, a silence which is all the more expressive precisely because it overwhelms language. Thus, trauma fiction reveals what Steiner refers to as ‘the revaluation of silence’ which emphasises ‘the conceit of the word unspoken’ (67). Uwem Akpan's short story, ‘Fattening for Gabon’, from his collection Say You're One of Them (2008), is concerned with the culpability of socio-economic structures in giving rise to and perpetuating trauma in children. This paper will examine the retrospective narration of the protagonist by paying particular attention to the motif of memory. A discussion of the painful ambivalence of the experience and textualization of trauma, as conveyed through the story's use of silence and the disruption of the conventional bildung typical of narratives of remembrance, will form a substantial part of the paper.

The Narrative of Remembrance in Ling Shuhua's Novels

The Narrative of Remembrance in Ling Shuhua's Novels

President Clinton's Apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: A Narrative of Remembrance, Redefinition, and Reconciliation

Employing a narrative framework, this article explores President Clinton's speech of apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Catalysts leading to the experiment, how the experiment was enacted, and the lingering impact of the experiment on African Americans' perceptions of the public health system are described. The U.S. government's rhetorical stance toward the experiment is analyzed in terms of how it creates a narrative of remembrance, redefinition, and reconciliation. The article argues the discourse serves to redefine the role of the Tuskegee Institute in the experiment while embracing the grand narrative of modernism.