The book begins with an overview of the field, with an emphasis on the question of subjectivity. Under the section title Memory Studies: Theories, Changes, and Challenges, these chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the volume. Section 2, Literature and the Power of Cultural Memory/Memorializing, focuses on the relation between literature and cultural memory. Section 3, Recuperating Lives: Memory and Life Writing, shifts the focus from literature to autobiography and life writing, especially those lives shaped by trauma and forgotten by history. Section 4, Cinematic Remediations: Memory and History, examines specific films in an effort to account for cinema’s intimate and mutually constitutive relationship with memory and history. The final section, Multi-Media Interventions: Television, Video, and Collective Memory, considers individual and collective memory in the context of contemporary visual texts, at the crossroads of popular and avant-garde cultures.
Russell J. A. Kilbourn is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (2010).
Eleanor Ty is a professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published on contemporary ethnic texts, and on 18th-century British women writers. She is the author of Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (2010) and co-editor, with Christl Verduyn, of Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (WLU Press, 2008).