Amnesia and the Nation

This book examines the relationships between memory, history, and national identity through an interdisciplinary analysis of James Joyce's worksas well as of literary texts by Kundera, Ford, Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Luria, Anderson, and Yerushalmi, this study explores the burden of the past and the nightmare of history in Ireland and in the American Southfrom the Battle of the Boyne to the Good Friday Agreement, from the Civil War to the 2015 Mother Emanuel killings.

Provides a timely and wide-ranging approach to Joyce through discussions of memory studies, cultural trauma, and history Connects Joyce to a larger cultural context including the historical memory of William III and the history of racism in the American South Challenges the negative notions of forgetting in order to explore the historical memory within the works of James Joyce

Autorentext

Vincent J. Cheng is Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English at the University of Utah, USA. He is the author of many scholarly articles and books, including Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity; Joyce, Race, and Empire; and Shakespeare and Joyce. His work addresses the intersections of postcolonial studies, race studies, twentieth-century literature, and contemporary culture.

Inhalt
1 Introduction: Memory, Forgetting, and the Imagination.- 2 The Nightmare of History and the Burden of the Past.- 3 The Will to Forget: Nation and Forgetting in Ulysses.- 4 The Memory of the Past: National Memory and Commemoration.- 5 Joyce, Ireland, and the American South: Whiteness, Blackness, and Lost Causes.- 6 Slavery, the South, and Ethical Remembrancing.- 7 Afterword.