The nature of time has haunted humankind through the ages. Some conception of time has always entered into our ideas about mortality and immortality, and permanence and change, so that concepts of time are of fundamental importance in the study of religion, philosophy, literature, history, and mythology. On one aspect or another, the study of time cuts across all disciplines. The International Society for the Study of Time has as its goal the interdisciplinary and comparative study of time. This volume presents selected essays from the 12th triennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Time at Clare College, Cambridge. The essays are clustered around themes that pertain to the constructive and destructive nature of memory in representations and manipulations of time. The volume is divided into three sections Inscribing and Forgetting, Inventing, and Commemoration wherein the authors grapple with the nature of memory as a medium that reflects the passage of time.
Jo Alyson Parker, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of The Author’s Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel (Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), and she has published essays on narrative and time.
Michael Crawford, Ph.D. (Toronto) is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University or Windsor. His research currently focuses upon the mechanisms that underlie the “segmentation clock” and that give rise to vertebrae.
Paul A. Harris is a Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. His specialties include critical theory, interdisciplinary studies, and constraint-based writing.
CONTENTS
Dedication
List of Contributors
Foreword (Michael Crawford, Jo Alyson Parker, Paul Harris)
President’s Welcoming Remarks
A Few Th oughts about Memory, Collectiveness and Aff ectivity (Remy Lestienne)
Founder’s Address
Reflections Upon An Evolving Mirror (J. T. Fraser)
Response: Globalized Humanity, Memory, and Ecology (Paul Harris)
Section I: Inscribing and Forgetting
Preface to Section I
Inscribing and Forgetting (Jo Alyson Parker)
Chapter One
The Body as a Medium of Memory (Christian Steineck)
Response (Remy Lestienne)
Chapter Two
Body Memories and Doing Gender: Remembering the Past and Interpreting the Present in Order to Change the Future (Karen Davies)
Response (Linda McKie)
Chapter Th ree
Coding of Temporal Order Information in Semantic Memory (Elke van der Meer, Frank Kruger, Dirk Strauch, Lars Kuchinike)
Chapter Four
Telling the Time of Memory Loss: Narrative and Dementia (Marlene P. Soulsby)
Response (Alison Phinney)
Chapter Five
Georges Perec’s “Time Bombs”: about Lieux (Marie-Pascale Huglo)
Chapter Six
Seeking in Sumatra (Brian Aldiss)
Section II: Inventing
Preface to Section II
Inventing (Paul Harris)
Chapter Seven
Furnishing a Memory Palace: Renaissance Mnemonic Practice and the Time of Memory (Mary Schmelzer)
Chapter Eight
The Radiance of Truth: Remembrance, Self-Evidence and Cinema (Heike Klippel)
Chapter Nine
Tones of Memory: Music and Time in the Prose of Yoel Hoff mann and W. G. Sebald (Michal Ben-Horin)
Response (David Burrows)
Chapter Ten
Once a Communist, Always a Communist: How the Government Lost Track of Time in its Pursuit of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Katherine A. S. Sibley)
Response (Dan Leab)
Chapter Eleven
Temporality, Intentionality, the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Causal Mechanisms of Memory in the Brain: Facets of One Ontological Enigma? (E. R. Douglas)
Section III: Commemoration
Preface to Section III
Commemoration—Where Remembering and Forgetting Meet (Michael Crawford)
Chapter Twelve
Jump-starting Timeliness: Trauma, Temporality and the Redressive Community (Jeffrey Prager)
Chapter Th irteen
Black in Black: Time, Memory, and the African-American Identity (Ann Marie Bush)
Chapter Fourteen
Remembering Th e Future: On the Return of Memories in the Visual Field (Efrat Biberman)
Responses (Shirley Sharon-Zisser)
(Robert Belton)
Chapter Fifteen
Family Memory, Gratitude And Social Bonds (Carmen Leccardi)
Chapter Sixteen
Time to Meet: Meetings as Sites of Organizational Memory (Dawna Ballard and Luis Felipe Gómez)
Index
People with an interdisciplinary bent will enjoy this approach to memory as a medium and as tool to manipulate, reflect, and mark the passage of time.