Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography

Offers a powerful model that uses literature to help fathom the nature of remembrance In this impressively interdisciplinary study, Evelyne Ender revists master literary works to suggest that literature can serve as an experimental laboratory for the study of human remembrance. She shows how memory has not only a factual basis, but is inseparable from fictional and aesthetic elements. Beautifully written in accessible prose, and impressive in its scope, the book takes up works by Proust, Woolf, George Eliot, Nerval, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Sigmund Freud, getting to the heart of essential questions about mental images, empirical knowledge, and the devastations of memory loss in ways that are suggestive and profound. Architexts of Memory joins a growing body of work in the lively field of memory studies, drawing from clinical psychology, psychoanalysis and neurobiology as well as literary studies.