Memory and Fiction: Trauma in Contemporary Romanian Literature

The studies of memory (memory studies) have developed a connection to the concept of trauma (trauma studies) and its manifestations. The literary field became a proper medium of evocation and testimony of past traumatic events. Therefore, social manifestations, traumatic measures of political regimes have all been integrated into literary works as a manner of attesting both their physical and psychological implications. Talking about the traumatic events of the Holocaust, James E. Young views such literary works as “documentary narrative” or, more specific, literature of testimony. Literary (and artistic) works related to the Holocaust are also object of Marianne Hirsch’s studies. In her view, evoking and narrating traumatic events implies the usage of postmemory. Past could also be evoked, as Michel Foucault considers, through literature on the basis of counter-memory. Taking into consideration different manifestations of memory in literature, the present study aims to analyse some of the Romanian contemporary works tackling on the remembrance of the traumatic ideological intervention on the female body that the prohibition of abortions represented during the communist regime. Corporal and psychological traumas that the 770 Decree caused are related in Corina Sabău’s novel And the Crickets Were Heard and also in the testimonial collective volumes Comrades of journey. The Feminine Experience in Communism (edited by Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu) and Mihaela Miroiu’s (ed.) The Birth. Lived Stories. Thus, literary materialisations of memory would be observed, in order for the contemporary reader to understand the severe traumatic implications of an abusive ideological prohibition of abortion.

Multidirectional Memory, Polyacroasis and (Un)translatability in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad

The primary aim of this chapter is to analyse the alignment between multidirectional memory and literature. Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory model is scrutinized so as to elucidate how this approach works in fiction. The chapter further analyses the rhetorical concept of polyacroasis, proposed by Tomás Albaladejo in 1998 in order to analyse its interlacing with multidirectional memory as well as to demonstrate the manner in which polyacroasis may function as a vehicle of multidirectional memory in literature. On the other hand, the notion of translator as secondary witness (Deane-Cox, 2013; 2017) will be employed so as to examine the role of the author as translator. By means of a case study, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad. Una novela de novelas, I will attempt to analyse how the frameworks provided by multidirectional memory and polyacroasis along with the workings of empathy encourage and pave the way to translatability. Similarly, I will examine how the notion of translator as secondary witness functions in a novel like Sefarad taking into account that the author of that novel inscribed his translation into Spanish of passages coming from Holocaust testimonies which were not published in Spain by the time the novel was being written.

The “estate text” in the poetry of the Soviet “Sixtiers”: E.A. Evtushenko, A.A. Voznesensky, B.A. Akhmadulina

The article discusses the reasons for referring to the estate text of the poets-“sixtiers”. It is proved that it could not be caused by simple historical interest, but was caused by the crisis of poetics, at the same time the exhaustion of its resources and the inability to embed another existential trial in the inherited resource of existential experience. Then the estate turns out to be a place of remembrance, where nature can be indistinguishable from culture, and in this indistinguishability a drift is possible from simple and routine forms of the “sixtiers” poetry to more complex ones. The specificity of the estate in the poetry of the three leading Russian poets of the sixties, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky and Bella Akhmadulina, is characterized, and it is shown that although the reasons for addressing the estate theme were different, the results, such as dialogue with tradition and updated author’s identity, a new reflection mode, turned out to be the same. This allows us to clarify literary estates as a resource not only of cultural memory in literature, but also of innovations in poetics or of those intermedial combinations and unexpected allusions that lead to innovations that are not limited to the thematic side.

Forgetting at the Intersection of Comics and the Multimodal Novel

This chapter explores how the cognitive process of forgetting, that is, the absence of memory, is understood in contemporary culture. Scholars of comics studies, multimodality, and narrative theory have often studied the archival functions of comics and the representation of memory in literature across media. This chapter, however, analyzes the ways in which forgetting is constructed at the interface of image and text in James Sie’s novel Still Life Las Vegas (illustrated by Sungyoon Choi) and how this text, a hybrid between comics and the multimodal novel, presents the impossibility of memory retrieval. In so doing, Sie develops a model of forgetting that locates interference and artifice rather than involuntary decay over time as the cause for oblivion. However, by presenting narration itself as a mode of interference and distortion, the novel also suggests that any act of threading memories will contribute to forgetting but that this forgetting is a generative process.