“‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory”
Author: Martha Rust
Author: Suzanne England
Abstract: “A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s “Mystory” mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories--ours and our students as well as those related by Nabokov--and to explore their tendencies to constellate around images, objects, and their metaphorical relations--the spiral, for instance. Following Ulmer, our Mystory is modeled after Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Like A Lover’s Discourse, it is based on a “tutor text”: A Lover’s Discourse’s tutor text is Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther; ours is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Like A Lover’s Discourse, our Mystory consists of a collection of “figures,” short open-ended compositions in which we write with and after Nabokov, weaving our responses to the autobiography with our own and each others' memories, including autobiographical and collective memories as well as memories of other texts. This “weaving” process is supported by our use of SCALAR (http://scalar.usc.edu/), a multi-modal web-authoring platform, as the environment for our collaborative work. Coupling the responsive Mystory mode of studying a memoir to the collaborative SCALAR writing environment facilitates students’ appreciation of the similarities between life writing and story writing, thereby also helping them to recognize the activity of remembering as itself a creative process.
Date: 09/04/2014
Conference Name: The Story of Memory: New Perspectives on the Relationship between Memory and Storytelling in the Twenty-First Century (sponsored by The Memory Network
Conference Session (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Conference Session
Author: Martha Rust and Suzanne England
Abstract: We proposed and had approved a session entitled "Teaching Memory Studies"
Excerpt from our session proposal:
“Negotiating Sites of Memory,” the presidential theme for the 2015 MLA convention together with the approval of an MLA Memory Studies forum in 2014 attest to an increasingly widespread application of the discipline of memory studies to the areas of scholarly endeavor the MLA supports, including the teaching of literature and writing. Previous MLA sessions related to teaching memory studies include “Teaching Life Writing Now” (presiding, Cassuto, 2011), and “Reading Memory: Approaches to Teaching the Memoir” (presiding, Donohue, 2015). Our panel will contribute to this growing conversation while also pushing the boundaries of memory studies pedagogy in literature courses beyond its close affiliation with memoir and literary criticism to attend to the cultural processes by which memories are shared. In the past several decades “cultural memory” has developed as a term to describe the ways societies remember their past using a variety of media (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). In this context, virtually any object of literary and cultural studies is a work of remembering, even as it at once evokes and takes root in readers’ and viewers own memories, a process that takes place on the collective as well as personal level. Together our papers demonstrate that by bringing the interdisciplinary tools of memory studies into the classroom, we are able to create an “official” disciplinarily structured space for exploring the contents and operations of memory both in an object of study and at the interface of object and viewer/readers, thus opening an awareness of memory as a life practice that is fluid, creative, and shared.
Date: 1/5/17
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Annual Convention
Teaching Memory Studies: Special Session at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Teaching Memory Studies: Special Session at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association
Author: Martha Rust and Suzanne England
Abstract: “Negotiating Sites of Memory,” the presidential theme for the 2015 MLA convention together with the approval of an MLA Memory Studies forum in 2014 attest to an increasingly widespread application of the discipline of memory studies to the areas of scholarly endeavor the MLA supports, including the teaching of literature and writing. Previous MLA sessions related to teaching memory studies include “Teaching Life Writing Now” (presiding, Cassuto, 2011), and “Reading Memory: Approaches to Teaching the Memoir” (presiding, Donohue, 2015). Our panel will contribute to this growing conversation while also pushing the boundaries of memory studies pedagogy in literature courses beyond its close affiliation with memoir and literary criticism to attend to the cultural processes by which memories are shared. In the past several decades “cultural memory” has developed as a term to describe the ways societies remember their past using a variety of media (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). In this context, virtually any object of literary and cultural studies is a work of remembering, even as it at once evokes and takes root in readers’ and viewers own memories, a process that takes place on the collective as well as personal level. Together our papers demonstrate that by bringing the interdisciplinary tools of memory studies into the classroom, we are able to create an “official” disciplinarily structured space for exploring the contents and operations of memory both in an object of study and at the interface of object and viewer/readers, thus opening an awareness of memory as a life practice that is fluid, creative, and shared.
Date: 01/05/2017
Primary URL: https://apps.mla.org/program_details?prog_id=154&year=2017
Primary URL Description: MLA Convention Program
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Annual Convention
“‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory.” (Book Section)
Title: “‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory.”
Author: Suzanne England
Editor: Alex Wilkinson
Editor: Carlo Comanducci and
Abstract: ‘A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,’ writes Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s ‘mystory’ mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories--ours and our students as well as those related by Nabokov--and to explore their tendencies to constellate around images, objects, and their metaphorical relations--the spiral, for instance. Following Ulmer, our mystory is modeled after Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Like A Lover’s Discourse, it is based on a ‘tutor text’: A Lover’s Discourse’s tutor text is Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther; ours is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Like A Lover’s Discourse, our Mystory consists of a collection of ‘figures,’ short open-ended compositions in which we write with and after Nabokov, weaving our responses to the autobiography with our own and each other’s memories, including autobiographical and collective memories as well as memories of other texts. This ‘weaving’ process is supported by our use of Scalar (http://scalar.usc.edu/), a multi-modal web-authoring platform, as the environment for our collaborative work. Coupling the responsive mystory mode of studying a memoir to the collaborative SCALAR writing environment facilitates students’ appreciation of the similarities between life writing and story writing, thereby also helping them to recognize the activity of remembering as itself a creative process.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://brill-com
Access Model: subscription
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: Matters of Telling: The Impulse of the Story
ISBN: 9789004387683