Remembering and rewriting: Alternate memories in contemporary fiction.

摘要

My dissertation examines how memory proper and alternate memories function in contemporary fiction. Memory in the works of minority and women writers becomes a tool with which the fictions' narrators read the past, rewrite their heritage, and interject their perspectives into the cultural memory we often accept unchallenged.;Chapter One is a general introduction that includes a brief overview of the art of memory since antiquity and a comparative discussion of the texts examined in the dissertation. Chapter Two discusses Funes's perceived "illogical" memory as compared to the narrator's selective and "logical" memory in Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes, the Memorious." Chapter Three analyzes Toni Morrison's Beloved and the rewriting of slavery fiction. Chapter Four is a comparative study of Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and of my translation from the Greek of Marianna Aenou-Koutouzi's Zacharokalama (Sugarcane). Both Lorde and Koutouzi in their autobiographies re-member and reinvent their lives through their mothers. Chapter Five focuses on Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and the scrutiny of the Chinese-American daughters' present life through the memories of their mothers. A selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources is included.