The Memory Effect is a collection of essays on the status of memory—individual and collective, cultural and transcultural—in contemporary literature, film, and other visual media. Contributors look at memory’s representation, adaptation, translation, and appropriation, as well as its mediation and remediation. Memory’s irreducibly constructed nature is explored, even as its status is reaffirmed as the basis of both individual and collective identity.
The book begins with an overview of the field, with an emphasis on the question of subjectivity. Under the section title Memory Studies: Theories, Changes, and Challenges, these chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the volume. Section 2, Literature and the Power of Cultural Memory/Memorializing, focuses on the relation between literature and cultural memory. Section 3, Recuperating Lives: Memory and Life Writing, shifts the focus from literature to autobiography and life writing, especially those lives shaped by trauma and forgotten by history. Section 4, Cinematic Remediations: Memory and History, examines specific films in an effort to account for cinema’s intimate and mutually constitutive relationship with memory and history. The final section, Multi-Media Interventions: Television, Video, and Collective Memory, considers individual and collective memory in the context of contemporary visual texts, at the crossroads of popular and avant-garde cultures.

Eleanor Ty is a professor and chair of the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She is the author of The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives and co-editor with Donald Goellnicht of Asian North American Identities beyond the Hyphen.

Christl Verduyn teaches Canadian Studies and English at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. She publishes on Canadian and Qu?b?cois women’s writing, multiculturalism and minority writing, and life writing, and was the recipient in 2006 of the Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies. She is the editor of Marian Engel’s Notebooks: Ah, mon cahier, coute ... (WLU Press, 1999) and Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries (WLU Press, 2005).

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Russell J. A. Kilbourn is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (2010).

Eleanor Ty is a professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published on contemporary ethnic texts, and on 18th-century British women writers. She is the author of Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (2010) and co-editor, with Christl Verduyn, of Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (WLU Press, 2008).

Russell J.A. Kilbourn's profile page