Abstracts

Victorian Poetry and the Remembering of Lyric 

Veronica Alfano

Lyric poems, unlike the novels that dominate the Victorian literary scene, resist the teleological drive of plot and vainly pursue static atemporality. Brevity and patterns of formal repetition, which disrupt a poem’s capacity for rendering experience as progressive narrative, also impress that poem on the reader’s memory. Thus Victorian lyricists, whose verses often lament the elusive nature of remembrance, also tend to write highly mnemonic poems—and so to pursue permanence both by dwelling on vanished beauty and by asking to be recalled. These desires are especially notable in the nineteenth century, because lyric is itself a site of cultural nostalgia in an age of realistic prose. Christina Rossetti, using exaggerated lyricism and numbed retrospection to subvert the figure of the unambitious and over-sentimental Victorian “poetess,” presents memorable poems that undermine their speakers’ humble requests to be forgotten; in contrast, A. E. Housman—despite the nostalgic tone and formally mnemonic stanzas of A Shropshire Lad—tends to grant individual remembrance neither to the lads he commemorates nor to the iterative poems he writes. Through readings of Rossetti and Housman, I propose that lyric is the key to comprehending this era’s fascination with mourning and memorializing the past. Victorian lyric’s navigation between the desire to recapture lost time and the reality of inevitable transience yields unstable forms of memory and self-narrative that are inflected with amnesia. Poetic reminiscence thus echoes what Richard Terdiman calls the nineteenth-century “memory crisis”: a secular and industrial era’s simultaneous dislocation from and longing for the past.     

Memory, Emotion, and Self in Development: How Children and Adolescents Form Connections with Self via Conversations with Others

Penny van Bergen

Across 30 years, a strong body of research in developmental psychology has shown how young children's autobiographical memory is developed via parent-child reminiscing conversations. More recent research shows how this same scaffolding also supports cognate development in self and emotion, as parts of the autobiographical experience are co-constructed in a manner more rich and reflective than the child would be capable of on their own. While this body of research shows a clear role for sociocultural pathways of the development of memory, emotion, and self in families, there remain questions about how effective non-familial social agents might be, about change across adolescence and the role of "vicarious" memories, and about opportunities for intervention. In this talk I will describe literature to date and share findings from recent intervention work with teachers and young children, adolescents and older adults, and with children in out of home care and their caseworkers.   

Medieval Spatialised Memory and Female Authority in Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies 

Louise D'Arcens

Christine de Pizan’s 1405 text Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) is celebrated today as a medieval female-authored defence of women that speaks back to misogynist textual tradition. In my paper I will explore its ingenious redeployment of medieval beliefs about the cognitive and emotional experiences involved in the use of memory—beliefs which were, furthermore, central to ideas about how the processes of textual reception and composition took place. I will argue that the Cité des Dames is best understood as a memorial text that reveals the importance of memory within the medieval authorising process and, in so doing, offers an alternative feminine textual memory. I will also demonstrate how Christine’s sophisticated exploitation of medieval mnemotechnique enables her to build her text as a mnemonic city which her readers can inhabit with her because they can replicate the text’s structure in their own memories. 

After Life: Grief and Narrative Scaffolding 

Regina Fabry

In recent years, philosophers of mind have advanced bold and sweeping claims about the important role of narrative for processes of grief. However, our understanding of this role, if any, has been hindered by at least three problems. First, given the notorious conceptual ambiguity of narrative, it remains largely unclear whether philosophical considerations on the grief-narrative nexus are targeted at the contentful products (stories), the material outcomes (discourses), or at acts of narration. Second, philosophical work tends to gloss over important differences between various kinds of narrative and modes of narration, which leads to unwarranted generalisations. Finally, while it has been suggested that narrative influences grief, it has not been shown how the realisation of this influence can be described. In this talk, I aim to start resolving these problems by considering the role of acts of narration for grieving with a focus on cases of self-referential textual narration. Drawing on recent research in philosophy of mind and cognition, I will suggest that the active crafting and revision of discourse and story configurations through writing can be aptly described in terms of mental scaffolding. This scaffolding perspective, I will show, can lead to a better understanding of the possible contributions of self-referential textual narration to two intertwined processes associated with grief: emotional experiences of irrevocable loss and the active autobiographical remembering of the deceased. To assess the possible role of textual narration for grief, I will consider empirical research on expressive writing as a test case.

Scaffolding experience, memory, and narrative in the context of ageing, aged care, and dementia: From theory to practice 

Celia Harris

Theoretical approaches from philosophy and cognitive science emphasise how experience, cognition, memory, and self are embedded within and distributed among the social and material environment. This ‘scaffolding’ perspective implies that the characteristics of the social and material environment are therefore critical to functioning well, since the environment constitutes components of cognition. This perspective provides new avenues for supporting people to age well, by maintaining and even enhancing cognitive, psychological, and social functioning. Ageing can involve impoverished environments, especially in the context of aged care, but there is an increasing requirement for care that respects the individual, their unique experience and history, and that tailors environments to connect the person to their sense of self. In this talk, I discuss evidence from lab-based and field-based research suggesting that the social and material environment can be shaped to enhance cognition, memory, identity, and relationships for older people including people with a cognitive impairment. I propose a framework for applying this knowledge to enhance aged care environments. 

Memory and Emotion in Life-Writing: Cognitive Literary Perspectives 

Merril Howie

The subtle, yet potent power of literary life narratives lies in their ability to act as cognitive frameworks, triggering, illuminating, and reshaping our perceptions of long-held, emotive memories. Autobiographical memory—personal recollections of life experience—is unique and profoundly important. Indeed, making sense of our lives by recalling myriad mnemonic images occupies much of our waking hours, and our unconscious dreams. Yet despite sustained scientific enquiry into memory and an ever-increasing Western consumption of others’ recollections in life-writing, there are few interdisciplinary literary analyses of memory’s impact in autobiographical works. Focusing on portrayals of memory in the celebrated memoirs of Joan Didion—The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011)—my analyses of literary techniques such as metaphor, rhetorical focussing, narrative rhythm, and cinematic-style montages, incorporate cognitive research into the mental processes such strategies can engender in the reader, including perceptual simulations, embodiment, and a panoramic mode of remembering. I aim to demonstrate how cognitive literary approaches to the interpretation of literary life narratives can illuminate influential interrelationships among memory, emotion (particularly powerful negative emotions), language and cognition. Such interdisciplinary insights enable us, in turn, to glean more informed understandings of how skilfully crafted, textual depictions of experiential traits of memory function and emotive recollections can effectively mobilise the personal memories and emotions of readers, drawing us into affective autobiographical reading involvements. 

Episodic Remembering as Autobiographical Narrative Practice 

Daniel Hutto

In previous writings, I (and others) defended the view that a familiar kind of memory – autobiographical memory – strongly depends upon the exercise of cognitive capacities gained through the mastery of narrative practices (Hutto 2017, Hutto & Myin 2017). When initially making the case for that view, I proposed that autobiographical remembering could and should be distinguished from purely episodic remembering. This presentation revisits the grounds for drawing that distinction, looking afresh at its tenability: It questions whether any kind remembering worthy of the label ‘episodic’ can occur independently from and prior to capacities for autobiographical remembering. Against this backdrop, a renewed case is made for thinking of episodic remembering as a distinctive sort of narrative practice. I situate and compare this ‘narrative practice’ proposal about episodic remembering with some of the latest rival theorizing about the nature, functions, and origins of episodic memory and episodic remembering. I give particular attention to theories that regard episodic remembering as a function of episodic memory systems – where such systems are assumed to operate in other species of nonhuman animal and the episodic remembering function is assumed not to depend on the mastery of narrative practices (Boyle 2022, Mahr 2002, Robbins 2022). 

Embodied Narratives Redux 

Richard Menary

I re-visit the case for embodied narratives as grounding the self that I have explored in previous work (Menary 2008, 2011, 2018, 2019). I provide an updated account and rejoinders to a selection of the responses to the original article. I will also explain how I have expanded the original conceptual apparatus to encompass the role of embodied narratives in early development and social cognition (broadly construed). 

I Want to Make a Film about Women

Karen Pearlman

I want to make a film about women is a queer, speculative documentary love letter to Russian constructivist women.  The documentary’s narration beings with some historical facts about filmmaker Esfir Shub (1894-1959). But then I say: ‘Esfir Shub wanted to make a film about women, and I want to make a film about her. How shall I do this?’. This is the film’s real question. It is the one I asked myself at every phase of writing, directing, and editing.  How shall I construct a narrative of women about whom too little is known?  How can I make an image of their distributed creative cognising? Should I insert myself into the story?  If, or rather when I do, is this a film about Esfir Shub or is it really a film about me – my hopes, fears, desires, and fascinations?  This presentation will include a screening of the 12-minute film, a discussion of formal devices I use to address or dodge these questions, and a reflection on how these devices have informed my approach to making films about women moving forward. The presentation concludes, if I am brave enough, with a brief work-in-progress excerpt from my current project, Breaking Plates, which picks up where I want to make a film about women leaves off and carries on asking questions.

On Not Asking “Should I insert myself in the text?”: Self-Narration and ‘Voice’ in Nonfiction Writing 

Kate Rossmanith

This presentation considers some of the ways in which nonfiction writers have conceptualised the relationship between themselves and their subject matter. It is an attempt to better understand what such a relationship is doing, and can do, epistemologically. In the paper I focus on nonfiction writing that has a ‘personal’ dimension e.g. memoir, essays, long-form journalism, ethnographies, and monographs in which there is a very present ‘I’ doing the telling.

I am motivated by the observation that people – women especially – who produce writing that appears memoir-ish are called ‘brave’. In such cases the ‘I’-narrator is interpreted as she-the-writer – a writer who has courageously bared all. Memoirists and essayists bridle at this misconception, and they clutch at language to describe the ‘I’ on the page that puts distance between the writer and the speaking voice (Rossmanith 2022).

My paper teases out the practicalities and implications of asking the common question: Should I insert myself in the text? It is a question that many writers of nonfiction ask themselves, and one that has been in circulation since at least the 1960s New Journalism movement, the rise of post-structuralism, and the ‘reflexive turn’ that occurred in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s. In this paper I suggest that this question is no longer useful to ask, that it is limiting and problematic. I explore alternative ways to think about what the ‘teller’ in nonfiction writing is and can do, and how this voice can be mobilised to advance critically-needed new knowledge. 

An Embodied Narrative Perspective on Trauma 

Lillian Wilde (with Sara Pini) 

Trauma is notoriously difficult to describe, as it often defies understanding. Nevertheless, narratives can become a medium through which experiences of trauma may be shared, alleviating the sense of alienation common to post-traumatic experience.

This presentation engages with the question of how trauma can be known, narrated, and shared. Building on phenomenological literature on trauma (Wilde 2022, 2021) and working with an autoethnographic approach to cancer (Pini 2022, 2019), it addresses the ways in which creative and expressive illness narratives—particularly the sharing of such experiences—can help patients heal or repair from trauma.

We identify the moment of the cancer diagnosis as a traumatic event, as it constitutes the expulsion of the individual into an alienworld: the world of the sick. We demonstrate how a philosophical account of unification (Walther 1923) may help shed light on the complexities of traumatic experience and highlight the potential of embodied narratives to re-establish a sense of belonging through sharing trauma experiences. We present a case in which performance art serves not only as an act of creatively re-modelling the performer’s illness narrative, but as a means to communicate this experience. Sharing the experience of trauma and recovery contributes to a re-constitution of a sense of belonging.

We highlight that the (re-)constitution of feelings of belonging is a dyadic process between the traumatized individual and others. An illness narrative needs to be heard, seen, or otherwise witnessed in order to fulfil its full healing potential.