Second-generation Memory Research Articles

Dementia prevention in memory clinics: recommendations from the European task force for brain health services.

Observational population studies indicate that prevention of dementia and cognitive decline is being accomplished, possibly as an unintended result of better vascular prevention and healthier lifestyles. Population aging in the coming decades requires deliberate efforts to further decrease its prevalence and societal burden. Increasing evidence supports the efficacy of preventive interventions on persons with intact cognition and high dementia risk. We report recommendations for the deployment of second-generation memory clinics (Brain Health Services) whose mission is evidence-based and ethical dementia prevention in at-risk individuals. The cornerstone interventions consist of (i)assessment of genetic and potentially modifiable risk factors including brain pathology, and risk stratification, (ii) risk communication with ad-hoc protocols, (iii) risk reduction with multi-domain interventions, and (iv) cognitive enhancement with cognitive and physical training. A roadmap is proposed for concept validation and ensuing clinical deployment.

City of (Post) Memory: Memory Mapping in Nona Fernández's 2002 Mapocho

In Mapocho (2002), Nona Fernández depicts the ghostly topography of post-dictatorship Santiago, Chile. Only the equally ghostly protagonist, la Rucia, an exile who returns to her childhood home in the liminal space between life and death, can conjure forth the memories of historical injustice guarded by neglected sites of memory. The novel traces la Rucia's movements through a city transformed by the forces of neoliberalism, modernization, and trauma, traversing the layered history of structural injustices in the traditionally indigenous and working-class neighborhood, la Chimba. The protagonist challenges the state's betrayal of local, grounded history as she digs beneath the modernized surface of the city to unbury suppressed subaltern histories. Can fiction open up new ways of inhabiting these haunted spaces? This work invites an analysis of second-generation memory, post-memory, and memory "transfer," arguing that fictional urban space allows for memory to be read topographically.

Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images by Anastasia Ulanowicz (review)

Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images by Anastasia Ulanowicz (review)

Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images by Anastasia Ulanowicz (review)

Reviewed by: Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images by Anastasia Ulanowicz Hamida Bosmajian (bio) Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images, by Anastasia Ulanowicz. New York: Routledge, 2013. The energy that drives Anastasia Ulanowicz’s Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images are the ghost images that haunt her, palimpsests of memories overheard and gathered as she listened to her elders as a child (xi). Although she interprets only five narratives of children’s literature, “case studies” she calls them, [End Page 285] her range and scope sweep wide. There are times the reader may fear she is wandering too far down a critical side path, but then she always hooks up seamlessly with her main argument and the reader concedes: “Aha, you know where you are going.” Ulanowicz accepts Samantha Power’s haunting definition of the twentieth century as “the age of genocide”(3). Soon there will be only second-generation memory narratives, even when a narrator imagines being an eyewitness. Ulanowicz’s focus is timely and the questions she raises in her well-researched analogical and associative discussions contribute in major ways to future explorations, for there will be—there are already—third-generation receivers of memory. “If ‘children’s literature of atrocity’ is a relatively new phenomenon,” she asks, “then how might its development coincide with equally newly emerging theories of memory?” (4). The scholars she consults are, however, not those who explore the cognitive and neurological or even the psychological development of the child faculty of memory; rather, they are in the humanist tradition of philosophy and the social sciences. Like Jonas in Lowry’s The Giver, Ulanowicz listens respectfully to her “elders” who inspire her in her “case studies” as she endeavors to effect a new direction in how we talk when we talk about narratives of atrocity at this juncture of our cultural history. Forgetting is the “shadowy twin”(31) of remembering. We want and we need to forget—and we will forget. Forgetting may be our undoing or our survival. Remembering demands a tremendous and often painful effort, spurred by ethical impulses and by critical consciousness, especially where disaster and trauma are at stake. All second-generation memory is collective, but second-generation memory receivers are aware that, in one way or another, they are shaped by the first generation. In her helpful introduction Ulanowicz points out that receivers of that context can never replicate the first generation’s traumatic experiences and reactions, but they can reimagine and reshape them, even incorporate them “as if [their] life depended on it—because, in a sense it does” (15). There is an inherent ethical, if not radically revolutionary inclination in second-generation memory, though Ulanowicz, while officially emphasizing it, doubts its actualization repeatedly (21–23). Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is the framing intellectual influence for this study, especially his writings about children during the 1920s and 1930s. He saw the child’s imaginative expressiveness, unconventionality, and ability to yoke disparate images as possessing not only critical but also radically revolutionary potential. Ulanowicz, to put it [End Page 286] simply, hopes that under the right circumstances the child listener’s or reader’s critical consciousness is stimulated to ask questions and therewith begin the process of change that may eventually be accepted by the collective will of the community. Though the last Armenian genocide had occurred during the Great War, Benjamin’s writings were completed before the age of atrocities began in Europe and his influence, belated as it is in the European and American context, cannot be considered as an emerging theory of memory. Furthermore, Ulanowicz does not acknowledge the potential propaganda value of Benjamin’s observations and theories. As long as children knew which side was “the right side,” German fascism and Soviet communism encouraged and radicalized children to question and critique. There is a rather romantic projection of the child’s primary impulses and spontaneity in Benjamin’s writing on this subject that Ulanowicz modifies. She sees the child, protagonist or reader, empathetically, critically, and creatively active as she or he absorbs and reenvisions memories conveyed by witness-survivors or by cultural media...

Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature by Anastasia Ulanowicz (review)

Reviewed by: Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature by Anastasia Ulanowicz Eric L. Tribunella (bio) Anastasia Ulanowicz. Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2013. As Anastasia Ulanowicz notes in her introduction to Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature, for at least the past decade children’s literature scholars have paid considerable attention to the youth literature of atrocity, including works about the Holocaust for children and young adults. Ulanowicz cites a number of critics such as Hamida Bosmajian, Adrienne Kertzer, Kenneth Kidd, and Lydia Kokkola, who have all considered depictions of trauma and atrocity in works for children. Ulanowicz’s book makes a valuable contribution both to this body of children’s literature scholarship and to the fields of trauma and Holocaust studies, which have traditionally focused primarily on works for adults. In fact, the latter fields would benefit from an expanded approach that considers fully the importance of the kinds of texts discussed by Ulanowicz. Her book concentrates on depictions of what she calls “second-generation memory,” or the memories of traumatic events produced in subsequent generations that did not directly experience those events. To the extent that children’s literature is already imagined as a vehicle for the transmission of cultural memory to younger generations, Second-Generation Memory presents a particularly useful case for understanding the ways children are encouraged to internalize, re-interpret, and hence remember their family’s or community’s experience of past atrocity (6). Ulanowicz offers original interpretations and deft close readings of a variety of works. In chapter 1, she shows how Lois Lowry’s The Giver points to the importance of second-generation memory for social change and how this memory requires both a critical capacity about and an intimacy with prior generations. Her analysis of The Giver’s ambiguous ending will be essential reading for scholars and students of the novel. Chapter 2 focuses on Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself and makes a successful argument for the complexity of this realist novel and its adult representation of a child’s imaginative attempt to piece together and make sense of her family’s unimaginable experience of the Holocaust. In chapter 3, Ulanowicz turns her attention to Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary, a real account of a girl’s experience living in Sarajevo between 1991 and 1993 during the Bosnian conflict, which Ulanowicz reads against Anne Frank’s own famous diary in terms of how they construct a child’s perspective on war. Chapter 4 examines Marsha Forchuk Skrypuck’s The Hunger, a young adult problem novel [End Page 217] about a contemporary girl with an eating disorder who is transported to the site of the Armenian Genocide of the early twentieth century. Ulanowicz concludes with a chapter on Mordecai Gerstein’s picture book The Man Who Walked between the Towers and the construction of memory after September 11, 2001. Ulanowicz’s analysis of the correspondence between the 1974 setting of Gerstein’s book and the political context of its 2003 publication is incredibly astute. Throughout Second-Generation Memory, Ulanowicz moves breathlessly back and forth between such literary works and secondary references—for instance, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to Zlata’s Diary, and from Roland Barthes’s study of photography to Judith Plotz’s reading of Charles Lamb, in one chapter—which some readers will applaud and others will find dizzying. Ulanowicz’s book is subtitled Ghost Images, a phrase that offers another way to think about second-generation memory and invokes an expression from photography referring to the usually accidental superimposition of two images in one photo. The metaphor of the ghost image usefully points Ulanowicz toward the importance of illustration and visuality in children’s books, and several chapters include extended discussions of relevant images (or verbal descriptions of images) from the literary works being discussed, related films, or relevant cultural contexts. In the chapter on Blume, Ulanowicz pays special attention to the importance of the photograph of Sally’s cousin Lila, who dies in the Dachau concentration camp, and what its ambiguity suggests about Sally’s search to uncover the mysteries of...

“Iraq in My Bones”: Second-Generation Memory in the Age of Global Media

This paper outlines my concept of “genealogical nostalgia,” the post-immigrant generation’s ambivalent longing for the places and stories of their parents’ birth. In her memoir The Orange Trees of Baghdad , second-generation Canadian Leilah Nadir navigates genealogical nostalgia and postmemory, articulating the unique condition of the post-immigrant generation in our globalized world.

‘Genealogical nostalgia’: Second-generation memory and return in Caterina Edwards’ Finding Rosa

Second-generation family memoirs often recount physical pilgrimages to distant homelands. While such journeys suggest a naive privileging of an essentialized, ideal origin, I argue that these visits also have the power to problematize origins by exposing the gaps between place and narrative. These journeys illuminate the dual forces of postmemory and what I term ‘genealogical nostalgia’, the longing for the times and places of one’s ancestral past. These ‘returns’ therefore can play a key role in the construction of second-generation identity. Drawing on Caterina Edwards’s 2008 memoir Finding Rosa, I show how journeys to the ‘homeland’ highlight the particularity of second-generation experience as a generation making connections between multiple forms of memory and multiple sites of belonging.

Resort: re/visiting, re/visioning, re/placing

This article describes an innovative relationship between the practice of landscape painting with theoretical research into second-generation memory. I adopt a practitioner's perspective by investigating the implications of the exchange between the materiality of both paint and landscape, the processes of painting and theoretical issues concerning second-generation memory. The form of this article has evolved out of a methodology parallel to my practice of painting: the issues have developed out of the painting objects and the painting processes, thus demonstrating how a very specific relationship with and understanding of both ‘landscape’ and postmemory might be embedded in the creative process itself.

Switched-current FPAAs can use S2I and S3I memory cells

The paper presents an overview of the switched-current (SI) technique at the level of basic memory cell, indicating new developments known as S2I and S3I. The designed field programmable analogue array (FPAA) using the second-generation memory cells is presented which can be programmed to perform filtering (up to 8-th order), amplification (with 1 to 1023 gain) and addition/subtraction of current signals.