Search results for "Memory"
showing 10 items of 2004 documents
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Bewilderment Trilogy” as Bildungsromane
2018
Abstract In this essay, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Bewilderment Trilogy” is read as a series of Bildungsromane that test the limits of that genre. In these thematically unrelated novels, characters reach critical points in their lives when they are confronted with the ways in which their respective childhoods have shaped their grownup expectations and professional careers. In each, the protagonist has a successful career, whether as a musician (The Unconsoled), a detective (When We Were Orphans), or a carer (Never Let Me Go), but finds it difficult to overcome childhood trauma. Ishiguro’s treatment of childhood in these novels foregrounds the tension between individual subjectivity and the formal st…
Post memory and cinematic affect in The Midwife
2017
The Second World War has proved a rich source of inspiration for fiction films worldwide. The Finnish fiction film The Midwife (Kätilö, Antti J. Jokinen, 2015) is aimed at an international audience with a story that takes place in the context of the Lapland War in Finland in 1944. The film tells of a romantic relationship between a local woman and a member of the German army, in a highly affective manner. This article argues that the film downplays elements that might have interested the national, or local, audience, and that it privileges affect over knowledge. To bring out the film’s transnational character, the article begins by analysing it in the context of national, or local, and glob…
Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq
2021
The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, ra…
Narrativity and intertextuality in the making of a shared European memory
2016
The latest wave of European integration process, cultural Europeanization, includes complex processes, such as the attempts to create a shared European memory that would transcend national interpretations of the past. The cultural Europeanization can be perceived as a narrative operation: in it the EU, Europe, and Europeanness are given meanings and made sense of through narrativization. The article investigates the EU’s attempts to create a shared European memory by analyzing the exhibition narrative of the Parlamentarium, the visitors’ center of the European Parliament. The analysis indicates how the construction of an official shared European memory is operationalized through textual and…
Live free or die motionless : Walking the migrant path from Italy to France
2018
This essay and the photographs examine visual traces of irregular mobility in the border landscape between Italy and France. The ruined buildings and objects witness decades of movement of undocumented people on this old migrant path across the mountains. By taking the theoretical concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) the essay argues that the Path of Hope can be thought of as a memory site through which the issues of migration in contemporary Europe can be seen in a more sustainable light. The ruins and discarded objects link memories of different places – including different border zones – in ways that allow us to critically examine borders as a practice – rather than as exis…
Temporality in cosmopolitan solidarity : Archival activism and participatory documentary film as mediated witnessing of suffering at Europe’s borders
2019
This article develops and extends the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity to temporality through a case study of archival activism and participatory film-making. It examines mediated witnessing within the Italian online audiovisual archive Archivio delle memorie migranti, which documents and archives the experiences of contemporary migrants in Italy. The moral basis of Archivio delle memorie migranti is cosmopolitan solidarity, which is usually understood as a practice that crosses spatial and communal boundaries. However, the ethics of solidarity also bridges past, present and future generations. Through the case of Archivio delle memorie migranti, this article demonstrates the significance o…
Green Wrocław: Urban Narratives of Three Post-War Generations of Wrocław’s Inhabitants
2020
This study is an invitation to reflect on issues that fall within the area of collective memory, an area that awaits further in-depth analysis. More specifically, this article is a proposal of a broader study on cultural landscape and places of memory than that which is dominant in the sociological literature. In particular, I examine the relationship between the inhabitants of the Polish “Western Lands” and the material German heritage of the cities in which they happen to live. I mainly focus on the relation between socially constructed memory and greenery—a “negligible” part of the space of human life. As I demonstrate in the article, the “green” narrations about Wrocław created after Wo…
Città Invisibili of Teatro Potlach: A Journey to Rediscover Our Cultural Heritage
2017
Città Invisibili is a multidisciplinary art project made by the Italian company Teatro Potlach. Compared to the canonical theatrical performances, Città Invisibili, being in its essence a site-specific performance, interacts with the place where it grows. With the project, the Italian group builds next to the existing space of the place (physical space and memory space) other two spaces, the space of the staging and the space of the performer, using different materials, in particular cloths and video projections. Moreover Teatro Potlach conducts a historical, anthropological and social research trying to bring out the latent memory of places. All these interventions bring out from the place…
Can persistent Epstein-Barr virus infection induce Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as a Pavlov reflex of the immune response?
2012
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a protracted illness condition (lasting even years) appearing with strong flu symptoms and systemic defiances by the immune system. Here, by means of statistical mechanics techniques, we study the most widely accepted picture for its genesis, namely a persistent acute mononucleosis infection, and we show how such infection may drive the immune system toward an out-of-equilibrium metastable state displaying chronic activation of both humoral and cellular responses (a state of full inflammation without a direct "causes-effect" reason). By exploiting a bridge with a neural scenario, we mirror killer lymphocytes $T_K$ and $B$ cells to neurons and helper lymphocytes $…
Combining dasatinib with dexamethasone long-term leads to maintenance of antiviral and antileukemia specific cytotoxic T cell responses in vitro
2012
Maintaining graft versus leukemia (GvL) and antivirus responses of cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) while suppressing graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) remains a challenge after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. Clinical observations indicate that combining glucocorticoids with multi-tyrosine-kinase inhibitors could be a successful therapeutic approach. We and others have shown that the BCR-ABL/SRC kinase inhibitor dasatinib may enhance or suppress T cells in vitro. In this report, we evaluated combination effects of dasatinib and dexamethasone on CD3 + and virus-specific CD8 + T cells directly ex vivo and on antigen-specific leukemia-reactive and alloreactive CD8 + T cell clones. Functional o…