Pas encore de mots-clés.
As travelling became a little bit problematic in the last months and many conferences have taken an alternative shape or were sadly cancelled, my plans to participate in conferences in 2020 had to be reconsidered. However, I would like to share with you here a paper proposal which I hope to be able to present in the future.
I applied for a conference called "The Memory of Place and the Place of Memory" organised by the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. I was extremely happy that my paper inspired by the topic of my Master's dissertation was accepted. Sadly, I was unable to participate in this conference this time.
I am sharing here with you my short proposal below, for which the word limit was around 250 words. The topic is one that I wanted to develop further in my dissertation. However, it became slightly digressive from the main focus of my dissertation. The conference would have been a good opportunity to develop this topic, but I will keep this proposal in mind in case a new opportunity arises to present or further expand it.
During my studies, I became increasingly interested in the relationship between space, place and memory. In my undergraduate dissertation, I analysed Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant (2015) and focused on the ways spaces and places contain, erase or revive memories. In my Master's dissertation, I turned my focus to literary works linked to the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My approach was to analyse how spaces contribute to the postmemory of coming generations. I looked at how the role of spaces, places and monuments differs / is similar between first-hand narratives by witnesses and narratives which I identified as products of postmemory.
***Photograph taken in Meiji-dori in Tokyo, September 2019.***
Dissociation between memory and monument
in the portrayal of stone monuments
in Yōko Ōta’s ‘Fireflies’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills
In 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki witnessed the destruction of their cityscape on a scale that was never experienced before. Literary responses to the events and their aftermath describe the challenge to rebuild not only the physical city through buildings and monuments, but also the memory of the city before the atomic bomb through literature.
Stone monuments in Yōko Ōta’s short story ‘Fireflies’ (1953), namely the Tamiki Hara memorial in Hiroshima, and Seibo Kitamura’s ‘Peace Statue’ in Nagasaki in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of Hills (1982) are problematic lieux de mémoire as they create a dissociation between the physical monument and the memory of the witnesses who experienced the events. In both literary responses the narrator expresses their reluctance and difficulty to engage with stone monuments built by outsider artists, using stones burnt by radiation or a human figure made of stone: ‘[…] a massive white statue in memory of those killed by the atomic bomb […] I was never able to associate it with what had occurred that day the bomb had fallen, and those terrible days which followed’ (Ishiguro, p. 137).
Using Max Pensky’s observation that the stones of the city are integral part of the identity of its inhabitants (Pensky, 2011), this paper compares the portrayal and narrative function of stone monuments commemorating the bombings in Ōta’s short story and Ishiguro’s novel and explores alternative lieux de mémoire in these literary responses.
Sources:
Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. Faber & Faber, 1982
Kitamura, Seibo. The Peace Statue, 1955
Ōta, Yōko. ‘Fireflies.’ In Ōe, Kenzaburo. The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath. Grove Press, 1953, 1985
Pensky, Max. 'Three kinds of ruins: Heidegger, Benjamin, and Sebald,’ in Poligrafi, 2011, p. 66
Photograph context:
I do not know who put on this sign, however its reference to the movie They Live (1988) is apparent. This is a street which leads to the Harajuku area of Tokyo, known for its excessive shopping culture. In my interpretation, the juxtaposition of the place of this sign and its reference points to the ruling consumer culture by which the Harajuku are is characterised.