Browsing by Author "Baek, Jiewon"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    La littérature française du vingtième siècle entre la mémoire et l’oubli: Proust, Beckett, Perec, et Blanchot; Twentieth Century French Literature between memory and forgetting: Proust, Beckett, Perec, and Blanchot
    Baek, Jiewon (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-06)
    In the course of the twentieth century, the representation of the relationship between time, narrative, and memory in French literature undergoes a change. Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu evidences the power of memory to synthesize separate moments through a work of art and embodies the thesis of Paul Ricoeur on the interdependency of time and narrative. This proustian synthesis becomes almost impossible for Samuel Beckett, George Perec, and Maurice Blanchot, who encounter the disappearance of memory preserved in the narrative space. Not only in the face of the spatialization of memory in the increasing development of mass media, which Walter Benjamin criticizes, but also in the face of the deterioration of space, the translation of a temporalized memory into a coherent story cannot continue. From Proust's immense edifice of memory, to Beckett's invention, to Perec's spatial preservation of vanished time, to Blanchot's désoeuvrement, the works of these authors traverse the wide span between memory and forgetting in literature. This paper integrates these authors who diverge in the direction of memory, on the one hand, and in the direction of forgetting, on the other. This integration forms passageways that make possible the exchange between these two ends. Communication continues in the gap where memory and forgetting are reflections of each other.