Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience

by S. Nalbantian

Overview

This book is the first to discover and probe in depth memory phenomena captured in literary works. Using literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, this comparative study of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz, including Proust, Breton, Woolf and Faulkner, uncovers valuable material for the classification of the memory process. Nalbantian's daring interdisciplinary work, involving literature, science, and art, forges a new model for dialogue between the disciplines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403966872
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/15/2002
Edition description:	2003
Pages:	185
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

SUZANNE NALBANTIAN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Long Island University. She received her PhD from Columbia University and is a permanent member of its Society of Fellows in the Humanities. A specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century European literatures, she is the author of The Symbol of the Soul from Hoderlin to Yeats, Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, and Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin. She has also edited Anais Nin: Literary Perspectives.

Table of Contents

List of Plates Acknowledgements Note on the Text Introduction Memory in the Era of Dynamic Psychology: Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds Rousseau and the Romantics: Autobiographical Memory and Emotion Baudelaire, Rimbauld, and Le Cerveau : Sensory Pathways to Memory Proust and the Engram: The Trigger of the Senses Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner: Associative Memory Apollinaire, Breton, and the Surrealists: Automatism and Aleatory Memory Nin, Borges and Paz: Labyrinthine Passageways of Mind and Language The Almond and the Seahorse: Neuroscientific Queries Afterword: Images of the Artists: Dali, Dominguez and Magritte Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

'In this book, Suzanne Nalbantian boldly ushers in a new way of writing

about literature. She bridges the gap between literary criticism and the

neurosciences by focusing on the phenomenon of memory as a site of

interdisciplinary interaction. Fully informed about the recent

developments of neurosciences, this book reopens a debate initiated at the

turn of the last century with James and Bergson...' - Professor Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

'Suzanne Nalbantian's Memory in Literature is a remarkable contribution to the voluminous literature on this most popular of subjects. Her range of reference, which includes not only a dozen major novelists and poets but painters as well along with all the major players from psychology and neuroscience, is most impressive. As she moves easily between languages she achieves an overview of the subject that is linguistically unconfined' - Professor James Olney, Louisiana State University

'There is much of interest here and much to learn from this sophisticated book.' - Brain: A Journal of Neurology

'well-informed and readable book' - Michael Eskin, Arcadia

From the Publisher