BOOK NEWS: Global, multidisciplinary approaches to memory

Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches

EDITED BY BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350230118

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/9781350230118/

Bringing together a diverse array of new and established scholars and creative writers in the rapidly expanding field of memory studies, this collection creatively delves into the multiple aspects of this wide-ranging field. Contributors explore race-ing memory; environmental studies and memory; digital memory; monuments, memorials, and museums; and memory and trauma.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Organized around 7 sections, this book examines memory in a global context, from Kashmir and Chile to the US and UK. Featuring contributions on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement; the AIDS crisis; and memory and the anthropocene, this book traces and consolidates the field while analyzing and charting some of the most current and cutting-edge work, as well as new directions that could be taken.

"Brett Ashley Kaplan has put together an innovative and appealing collection that opens up a dynamic, multipronged vision of memory studies. With fiction and memoir placed side-by-side with essays by scholars, activists, and practitioners, Critical Memory Studies offers new directions for a field rapidly becoming institutionalized. Its global scope, interdisciplinary range, and attention to urgent areas of concern, such as ecology and race, make it a must read for all those concerned with the future of the past. —Michel Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

"Unique in its combination of creative and scholarly approaches to memory, this rich collection presents the cutting-edge of memory studies. Absolutely essential reading." —Susanne C, Knittel, Utrecht University, Netherlands

"This important volume shows the diversity of contemporary cultural memory studies. It opens new avenues for the field by bringing together scholarly and artistic work in a way that invites us to reflect on the fluidity between fictional and theoretical approaches to cultural memory." —Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku, Finland

Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and is a professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her novel, Rare Stuff, was published in 2022 and she is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth.

Book News: Transdisciplinary study of literary madness

Madness And Literature: What Fiction Can Do for the Understanding of Mental Illness

EDITED BY LASSE R. GAMMELGAARD

U of Exeter P, 2022

ISBN: 9781905816378

https://www.exeterpress.co.uk/products/madness-and-literature

Mental illness has been a favorite topic for authors throughout the history of literature, while psychologists and psychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have in turn been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and literature share the endeavor to explore and explain the human mind and behavior, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Using a theoretical approach that is eclectic and transdisciplinary, this volume engages with literature’s multifarious ways of probing minds and bodies in a state of mental ill health. The cases and the theory are in dialogue with a clinical approach, addressing issues and diagnoses such as trauma, psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, hoarding disorder, PTSD and Digital Sexual Assault.

The chapters in Part I address literary representations of madness with a historical awareness, outlining the socio-political potentials of madness literature. Part II investigates how representations of mental illness in literature can offer unique insights into the subjective experience of alternative states of mind. Part III reflects on how literary cases can be applied to help inform mental health education, how they can be used therapeutically and how they are giving credence to new diagnoses. Throughout the book, the contributors consider how the language and discourses of literature—both stylistically and theoretically—can teach us something new about what it means to be mentally unwell.

There’s news here that moves us to reconsider not only what literature can teach us, but how it can teach us, and even be of service to people living with mental illness and those who treat and care for them. Here’s a lively and far-reaching contribution to the field of medical humanities. -- Maura Spiegel, division of narrative medicine, Columbia University

A wonderful array of critical and reflective accounts about literature representing mental illness in keeping with a health humanities approach that values interdisciplinary, inclusive and potentially applicable knowledge. -- Paul Crawford, professor of health humanities, University of Nottingham

 

Lasse R. Gammelgaard is associate professor at the Department of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he is co-director of the research group Health, Media and Narrative. He is author of the high school textbook Galskab i litteraturen [Madness in Literature]. His articles appear in Narrative, Style, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui and Journal of Research in Sickness and Society among others.