60 | 2018
La Vie de l’oubli dans la littérature britannique des XXe et XXIe siècles

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Credits: image de couverture : © Daisy Patton
The essays included in this issue were originally presented at two conferences organized in March 2017 and May 2018 by the research centre Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes, University Toulouse - Jean Jaurès. The authors seek to delineate an ars oblivionis in 20th- and 21st-century British literature, a poetics of forgetting in which oblivion’s ghostly remains make for emancipatory swerves from the past and for the advent of new narrative configurations. After Ricœur and Augé among others, remembering and forgetting are not envisaged as opposites but as a collaborative pair, with forgetting as the condition of memory (Ricœur) or as the lifeblood of memory (Augé). Working on the productive interplay of memory and forgetting, the articles investigate what Derrida calls «the life of forgetting», the living appropriation of forgotten presences acknowledged as loss and yet made to survive, to endure, in renewed and transfigured presences. Thus, forgetting is not only the condition of memory; it is also the condition of creativity and storytelling.
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Introduction [Full text]