Places Of Memory Research Articles

Two or Three Ideas: Vol. 13. No. 7, October 1951

Two or Three IdeasVol. 13. No. 7, October 1951 Wallace Stevens My first proposition is that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one. One of the better known poems in Fleurs du Mal is the one (XII) entitled "La Vie Antérieure" or "Former Life." It begins with the line: J'ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques. or A long time I lived beneath tremendous porches.It continues:Which the salt-sea suns tinged with a thousand firesAnd which great columns, upright and majestic,At evening, made resemble basalt grottoes. The poem concerns the life among the images, sounds and colors of those calm, sensual presences At the center of azure, of waves, of brilliances. And so on. I have chosen this poem to illustrate my first proposition, because it happens to be a poem in which the poem itself is immediately recognizable without reference to the manner in which it is rendered. If the style and the poem are one, one ought to choose, for the purpose of illustration, a poem that illustrates this as, for example, Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree." To choose a French poem which has to be translated is to choose an example in which the style is lost in the paraphrase of translation. On the other hand, Baudelaire's poem is useful because it identifies what is meant by the poem itself. The idea of an earlier life is like the idea of a later life, or like the idea of a different life, part of the classic repertory of poetic ideas. It is part of one's inherited store of poetic subjects. Precisely, then, because it is traditional and because we understand its romantic nature and know what to expect from it, we are suddenly and profoundly touched when we hear it declaimed by a voice that says: I lived, for long, under huge porticoes. It is as if we had stepped into a ruin and were startled by a flight of birds that rose as we entered. The familiar experience is made unfamiliar and from that time on, whether we think of that particular scene, we remember how we held our breath and how the hungry doves of another world rose out of nothingness and whistled away. We stand looking at a remembered [End Page 153] habitation. All old dwelling-places are subject to these transmogrifications and the experience of all of us includes a succession of old dwelling-places: abodes of the imagination, ancestral or memories of places that never existed. It is plain that when, in this world of weak feelings and blank thinking, in which we are face to face with the poem every moment of time, we encounter some integration of the poem that pierces and dazzles us, the effect is an effect of style and not of the poem itself or at least not of the poem alone. The effective integration is not a disengaging of the subject. It is a question of the style in which the subject is presented. Although I have limited myself to an instance of the relation between style and the familiar, one gets the same result in considering the relation between style and its own creations, that is between style and the unfamiliar. What we are really considering here are the creations of modern art and modern literature. If one keeps in mind the fact that most poets who have something to say are content with what they say and that most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it, the importance of this discussion becomes clear. I do not mean to imply that the poets who have something to say are the poets that matter; for obviously if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, it follows that, in considering style and the its own creations, that is to say, the relation between style and the unfamiliar, it may be, or become, that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter. Today, painters who have...

A Photomontage of Memory: The Role of the Visual in Angharad Price’s “The Life of Rebecca Jones”

The article examines the visual aspect of the novel The Life of Rebecca Jones by the contemporary Welsh writer Angharad Price. The book is an imaginary autobiography of the eponymous Rebecca Jones, Price’s distant relative, who died of diphtheria in 1916, aged 11. Apart from Rebecca’s family photographs reproduced in the text, ekphrastic descriptions of a photograph, a painting (by a blind artist) and the video recording of a television programme, the novel problematizes the dichotomy between seeing and blindness. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how these elements in Price’s novel contribute to the production of meaning by generating tension between two different modes of discourse: verbal and visual. Price’s novel is read as an ‘imagetext’ which, by adopting photographic/visual features, creates an illusion of ‘photographic’ verisimilitude (described as a trompe-l’œil effect). This mechanism is interpreted as the manifestation of the narrator’s struggle to assert her authority as a perceiving subject and the text itself as a site where the memory of place and family history can be preserved.

Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology eds. by Jacqueline Marino and Will Miller

Reviewed by: Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology eds. by Jacqueline Marino and Will Miller James J. Connolly Jacqueline Marino and Will Miller, eds., Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology. Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2015. 224 pp. $20.00. With the possible exception of Detroit, no city has epitomized the Rust Belt experience more so than Youngstown, Ohio. For a time, its hulking, empty steel factories, struggling neighborhoods, flamboyant mobsters, and corrupt politicians seemed to represent all of the ills that had accumulated in the once-thriving industrial cities of the American Midwest and Northeast. Bruce Springsteen even wrote a dirge about the city while journalists and scholars narrated its decline in extensive detail. More recently Youngstown has become a model of Rust Belt revival. It was among the first to embrace the notion of a shrinking city, an approach that has earned praise from think tanks and economic development specialists and even earned its former mayor, Jay Williams, a job heading the Commerce Department's Economic Development Agency. Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology lets locals have a say in the ongoing conversation about this quintessential Rust Belt city. A collection of short essays, poems, and photographs produced by Youngstown residents and assembled by its editors, Jacqueline Marino and Will Miller, it offers a rich and varied account of growing up in Youngstown, living there now, and striving for revival. The book is "not about the past" its editors insist, nor is it mindless boosterism (8). Instead, it presents firsthand accounts of Youngstown experiences, good and bad. Despite these protestations, there is a nostalgic tone to the book. Memories of people and places, mostly warm, occasionally sardonic, suffuse many of the entries, even in the portions devoted to renewal. There is no reason to shy away from that sensibility because, viewed from the vantage points presented here, Youngstown is best imagined as a success story, a city that thrived for several [End Page 81] generations and enabled those living there to build rich, meaningful lives. When it revives, in whatever form, it will do so because of its past rather than in spite of it. The book is organized to reject a simple narrative of decline. The editors divided the contributions into sections on Loss, Family, Work, and, finally, Rise, an arrangement that seems designed to accentuate current experience and the city's efforts at renewal in recent years. The section on Loss is a bit of a surprise, dwelling more on music and the local music scene than on old neighborhoods and shuttered factories. Yet the essays devoted to Family focus mostly on the recollections of those moved away or the memories of parents and grandparents, such as Keith Gottberg's affecting reminiscences of his steel-worker grandfather and Stan Sujka's tribute to his dziadek, his adopted grandfather. Discussions of Work take place mainly in the past tense as well. These include Tom Kerrigan's well-crafted memoir of summer employment at US Steel's Ohio works, where he witnessed the struggles of a single mother in the face of sexist abuse, or Tom Wood's account of his odd-jobs work as a teenager at a local factory, which included assignments such as dredging up the remains of a dead guard dog that instilled in him "an aptitude for dealing with death and decay" (137). If the contributions devoted to Youngstown's "Rise" avoid this nostalgic quality, they nevertheless take on a defensive or boosterish tone, with essays entitled "Defending Youngstown," and "Making the Case for Youngstown" mining this vein most explicitly. Interspersed photographs, more than a few of which examine empty, rusting factories, reinforce the book's wistful character, as do profiles of a series of sports figures—Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, Bernie Kosar, Jim Tressel, and Maurice Clarrett—who rose to great heights before falling precipitously. (Presumably their efforts to pick themselves up again and go on explain their inclusion in the "Rise" section of the book.) Like so many commentators on the American Rust Belt, the editors of Car Bombs to Cookie Tables seemingly feel compelled to deny the idea that Youngstown's best days are behind it...

Spirit knows: materiality, memory and the recovery of Spiritualist places and practices in Stoke-on-Trent

Much has been written about constructing memories of place, yet few speak of the difficulties in dealing with lost, partial and fragmented histories of place. We argue that behind the idea of ‘memory of place’ is an assumption that these memories are recoverable and can build a sense of place. Our research has led us to assume the opposite: not just that the fragments of history cannot build a complete memory of place, but that this understanding of memory and place is itself skewed by its reliance on materiality. This paper stems from a project that explores the place of spirituality in everyday life through insights from Spiritualist churches and their congregations. Whilst evidence of Spiritualist locations can be partially obtained through documentary records, a key challenge has been in understanding practices in the context of Spiritualism’s disassociation with materiality and the centrality of Spirit. The paper concludes that retracing Spiritualism’s past, and capturing its contemporary spiritual practices, uncovers a ‘memory of place’ that is not only in constant transience, but that can only be known through Spirit.

Discrete Serotonin Systems Mediate Memory Enhancement and Escape Latencies after Unpredicted Aversive Experience in Drosophila Place Memory.

Feedback mechanisms in operant learning are critical for animals to increase reward or reduce punishment. However, not all conditions have a behavior that can readily resolve an event. Animals must then try out different behaviors to better their situation through outcome learning. This form of learning allows for novel solutions and with positive experience can lead to unexpected behavioral routines. Learned helplessness, as a type of outcome learning, manifests in part as increases in escape latency in the face of repeated unpredicted shocks. Little is known about the mechanisms of outcome learning. When fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster are exposed to unpredicted high temperatures in a place learning paradigm, flies both increase escape latencies and have a higher memory when given control of a place/temperature contingency. Here we describe discrete serotonin neuronal circuits that mediate aversive reinforcement, escape latencies, and memory levels after place learning in the presence and absence of unexpected aversive events. The results show that two features of learned helplessness depend on the same modulatory system as aversive reinforcement. Moreover, changes in aversive reinforcement and escape latency depend on local neural circuit modulation, while memory enhancement requires larger modulation of multiple behavioral control circuits.

Remembering and Rewriting the Familial Traumascape in Alice Pung’s memoir Her Father’s Daughter

Often in immigrant literature, the familial landscape or homeland is considered a traumascape, which as Maria Tumarkin explains, is a place ‘marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering and loss’ (2005: 12). For many first-generation immigrants and refugees forced into leaving their homelands, the familial traumascape is also trapped in a past that no longer exists, or exists only in memories that are subject to traumatic ‘visual and sensory triggers’ (Tumarkin 2005: 12). This paper will show how second-generation immigrant writer Alice Pung has used her father’s firstgeneration trigger memories of place in her memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) to direct her own writing. A textual analysis of the father’s present day narrative will reveal details of the traumatic events of an unliveable homeland and the intergenerational impact of this familial traumascape on his daughter. It will also discuss how, at the heart of Her Father’s Daughter, is the Barthesian idea of the punctum and its connection with testimony; and how the father’s homeland or familial landscape becomes the traumatic wounded site of painful trigger memories. Examining the writing from the site of the wound, this paper shows how the father’s traumatised memories of his homeland are able to be transformed as postmemories of place and belonging for the second-generation/daughter in her memoir.

Hierarchically self-organizing visual place memory

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Knockdown of zif268 in the Posterior Dorsolateral Striatum Does Not Enduringly Disrupt a Response Memory of a Rewarded T-Maze Task

Under certain conditions pavlovian memories undergo reconsolidation, whereby the reactivated memory can be disrupted by manipulations such as knockdown of zif268. For instrumental memories, reconsolidation disruption is less well established. Our previous, preliminary data identified that there was an increase in Zif268 in the posterior dorsolateral striatum (pDLS) after expression of an instrumental habit-like 'response' memory, but not an instrumental goal-directed 'place' memory on a T-maze task. Here, the requirement for Zif268 in the reconsolidation of a response memory was tested by knockdown of Zif268, using antisense oligodeoxynucleotide infusion into the pDLS, at memory reactivation. Zif268 knockdown reduced response memory expression 72H, but not 7d later. Western blotting revealed a non-significant increase in Zif268 in the pDLS in rats using response memories, but there was no change in Zif268 expression in the hippocampus following retrieval of a place memory. Zif268 expression increased in the basolateral amygdala after memory reactivation whether a response or place strategy was used during reactivation. We propose that Zif268 expression in the basolateral amygdala may be linked to prediction error, generated by the absence of reward at reactivation. Taken together, these results suggest a complex role for Zif268 in the maintenance of instrumental memories.

Finding Home: Landmark Ambiguity in Human Navigation.

Memories of places often include landmark cues, i.e., information provided by the spatial arrangement of distinct objects with respect to the target location. To study how humans combine landmark information for navigation, we conducted two experiments: To this end, participants were either provided with auditory landmarks while walking in a large sports hall or with visual landmarks while walking on a virtual-reality treadmill setup. We found that participants cannot reliably locate their home position due to ambiguities in the spatial arrangement when only one or two uniform landmarks provide cues with respect to the target. With three visual landmarks that look alike, the task is solved without ambiguity, while audio landmarks need to play three unique sounds for a similar performance. This reduction in ambiguity through integration of landmark information from 1, 2, and 3 landmarks is well modeled using a probabilistic approach based on maximum likelihood estimation. Unlike any deterministic model of human navigation (based e.g., on distance or angle information), this probabilistic model predicted both the precision and accuracy of the human homing performance. To further examine how landmark cues are integrated we introduced systematic conflicts in the visual landmark configuration between training of the home position and tests of the homing performance. The participants integrated the spatial information from each landmark near-optimally to reduce spatial variability. When the conflict becomes big, this integration breaks down and precision is sacrificed for accuracy. That is, participants return again closer to the home position, because they start ignoring the deviant third landmark. Relying on two instead of three landmarks, however, goes along with responses that are scattered over a larger area, thus leading to higher variability. To model the breakdown of integration with increasing conflict, the probabilistic model based on a simple Gaussian distribution used for Experiment 1 needed a slide extension in from of a mixture of Gaussians. All parameters for the Mixture Model were fixed based on the homing performance in the baseline condition which contained a single landmark. from the 1-Landmark Condition. This way we found that the Mixture Model could predict the integration performance and its breakdown with no additional free parameters. Overall these data suggest that humans use similar optimal probabilistic strategies in visual and auditory navigation, integrating landmark information to improve homing precision and balance homing precision with homing accuracy.

場所の記憶と中心の再構築 : 沖縄意識の形成と観光という舞台(聖地・慰霊・宗教的ナショナリズムの再構築,パネル, 第六十五回学術大会紀要)

場所の記憶と中心の再構築 : 沖縄意識の形成と観光という舞台(聖地・慰霊・宗教的ナショナリズムの再構築,パネル, 第六十五回学術大会紀要)

The Drosophila melanogaster tribbles pseudokinase is necessary for proper memory formation

The tribbles (trbl) pseudokinases play important roles in signaling and physiology in multiple contexts, ranging from innate immunity to cancer, suggesting fundamental cellular functions for the trbls’ gene products. Despite expression of the trbl pseudokinases in the nervous systems of invertebrate and vertebrate animals, and evidence that they have a function within mouse and human dopamine neurons, there is no clear case for a function of a Trbl protein that influences behavior. Indeed, the first and only evidence for this type of function comes from Drosophila melanogaster, where a mutation of the single trbl gene was identified in a genetic screen for short-term memory mutant flies. The current study tested flies containing multiple trbl mutant alleles and potential transgenic rescue in both operant place memory and classical olfactory memory paradigms. Genetic complementation tests and transgenic rescue of memory phenotypes in both paradigms show that the D. melanogaster trbl pseudokinase is essential for proper memory formation. Expression analysis with a polyclonal antiserum against Trbl shows that the protein is expressed widely in the fly brain, with higher expression in the cellular rind than the neuropil. Rescue of the behavioral phenotype with transgenic expression indicates the trbl function can be localized to a subset of the nervous system. Thus, we provide the first compelling case for the function of a trbl pseudokinase in the regulation of behavior.

Methods and Techniques Used in Significant Restoration Projects in Qatar

ABSTRACTThe large number of conservation and restoration works recently completed in Qatar show that there exists a need to enhance appreciation of the local architectural and building traditions, as a way of bringing to light the historical memory of these local places, using local techniques and materials to conserve existing buildings and to typologically integrate them. This paper offers an update on the status of some recent conservation projects in Qatar, analysing and comparing a number of completed restorations of historic buildings on the basis of the categories into which they can be organised; the extent to which they had deteriorated before restoration; the methods that were adopted; the construction materials and techniques used; the philosophical approach taken to restoration; and the various proposals for reusing the restored buildings. Comparison and analysis of the data make it possible to classify these methods and techniques in ways that could be applied to other conservation projects in future. The aim is to define a philosophy and methodologies that are consistent, and will be able to give expression to the specific local culture in matters of conservation, while respecting shared international rules.

Time- and Self-Related Memories Predict Restorative Perceptions of Favorite Places Via Place Identity

Top–down processing has been highlighted as a potential, but as yet understudied, aspect of restorative environmental experience. In an online study, N = 234 adults resident in Finland rated their favorite Finnish place on measures of perceived restorativeness, perceived restorative outcomes, and place attachment, and provided qualitative descriptions of the place and a positive memory associated with it. Thematic analysis of qualitative data revealed seven themes underpinning place memories: the environment itself, activities within it, cognitive responses, emotional responses, social context, self, and time. Mediated regression analyses showed positive and significant relationships between restorative perceptions and the presence of memories of self and time, as mediated via place attachment (place identity factor). These findings emphasize the contribution of the person to the perception of their restorative experiences in places, particularly in the form of personal memories that can enhance place identity.

This Sense of Place/ this Living Archive: Cocreative Digitization and First Nations Peoples Remembering

In 2016, we organized digital storytelling workshops with First Nations1 participants in Melbourne (Australia) to cocreatively “map” sites of historical significance through locative technologies. These digital memory maps allowed participants to share their oral stories about their relationships to different places with broader audiences through a cultural walking trail mobile app from both their individual and their collective perspectives. Functioning much like a museum tour guide in an outdoor setting, we named this app “Memory-scapes,” as it would feature First Nations people's memories of different places, allowing interested members of the public (tourists, students, and educators) to listen to and watch the digital stories as they physically walked the trail. We found that a cocreative archival framework for digitizing these oral histories supported our work with community. Through this project, we illustrate how First Nations people's knowledges are populating the archive in forms that place the control of content back in their hands. These community-driven archives reveal how new archival practices are shifting the media landscape of representational possibilities. While calling attention to the politics of representing place, we also question the emancipatory potential of digital technologies for First Nations people.

Reconstruction the Place Memory of Old Town in Cheorwon

Reconstruction the Place Memory of Old Town in Cheorwon

場所の記憶 : 廃墟の詩学(第五十九回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

場所の記憶 : 廃墟の詩学(第五十九回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

Melodies of God: the significance of the soundscape in conserving the Great Zimbabwe landscape

ABSTRACTSacred landscapes require a holistic approach for conservation. They are intimate spaces, susceptible to cultural erosion if the focus is on material culture only. Mainstream conservation theories and processes, developed from western heritage traditions, emphasize monumentality. However, there are unquantifiable connections between people and place, which if eroded, can result in memory erasure and, ultimately, the un-inheriting of the heritage place. Soundscape, the relationship between people and the sounds around them, is an innovative way to understand these intimate connections. Using Great Zimbabwe, I examine how local communities connect and sustain place memory through preservation of intangible heritage. Several events at Great Zimbabwe have shown that soundscape is one way to represent these connections and that preserving the soundscape can also enhance tangible heritage conservation. I examine how the Great Zimbabwe cultural landscape’s soundscape is used to preserve memory and sustain connections between the people and the landscape.

Experiencing place: Younger people with dementia facing aged care

There are currently few facilities for people with younger onset dementia and they are placed by default into dementia care facilities designed for the elderly. There is limited understanding of how people with younger onset dementia and their care givers anticipate or experience aged residential care. This qualitative study has used semi-structured interviews to give voice to the opinions and perspectives of nine people with younger onset dementia and 11 care givers. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used for idiographic analysis, allowing examination of the lived experience of younger people with dementia and an iterative exploration of what their experiences mean. Themes of memory, autonomy and therapy emerged from the data. There is a need for a familiar memory of place in an intergenerational community and home-like setting. The loss of autonomy and ensuing stagnation or even institutional internment was much feared. Appropriate exercise and purposeful occupational activities as well as emotional support were valued therapies but often lacking for this group Conclusions: Emotional distress with the loss of a meaningful life can result from the placement of younger people with dementia into old age services. Development of age-appropriate services are required.

Sex differences during place learning in the túngara frog

The adaptive specialization hypothesis states that sex differences in cognition are shaped by differences in cognitive demands to solve ecological problems. While it is widely accepted that female mate choice can lead to the evolution of exaggerated male traits, mate choice might also select for different cognitive abilities in males and females. In the tungara frog, Physalaemus (= Engystomops) pustulosus, males call from a fixed position in breeding ponds while females visit multiple males before returning to the preferred mate. Thus, we predicted that females have better place memory than males. We tested this prediction in a place-learning task in which the rewarded arm of a maze was associated with a visual cue. We found that females were able to use the visual cue to solve the task while males were not, even though both males and females could discriminate the cues in an optomotor test. In contrast, males attempted to solve the task using egocentric cues (remember body-turn direction) in spite of the fact that our training procedure interrupted their use of such cues. Finally, we found that males and females had similar motivation to solve the task but females showed a greater ability to inhibit incorrect responses, leading to improved learning. Our finding that females could use a visual cue to remember locations in space is consistent with the idea that place memory could improve sequential mate assessment in tungara frogs.

The Cultural Geopolitics of Ethnic Nationalism: Turkish Urbanism in Occupied Istanbul (1918–1923)

What are the roles of history and memory in geopolitics? How does urban experience influence geopolitical understandings of one's place in the world? This article brings these questions to a study of how Ottoman Turkish citizens of Istanbul came to link ethnicity with nationalism and to view their Greek Orthodox neighbors as national betrayers. I propose an explicitly cultural geopolitics: an affective, embodied critical geopolitics contextually dependent on experience, encounter, and memory in place. My sources are postwar Ottoman humor gazettes published in Istanbul, the waning capital of the Ottoman Empire, while it was occupied by Allied forces immediately after World War I. The future sovereignty of the city was unknown, and there was no coherent state structure. As normative (and also subversive) popular media, humor gazettes illustrate the reverberation of postwar geopolitics with the lived and remembered processes of urban place. Ethno-nationalist Turkish belonging in Istanbul was a form of urbanism, composed of place-based norms for behavior and a commonly understood cultural geography of the city. Satirical depictions of urban Turkish and Greek encounters during the armistice era betray a Turkish anxiety surrounding territorial and historical claims to the city and also a simultaneous questioning and hardening of the imagined geographies that demarcated Turkish and Greek identities as nationally distinct. This research illuminates the topological and relational dimensions of ethno-nationalist identity formation and the role of urban cultural processes in political belonging in the contemporary Middle East.