This far-reaching study of women's literature sheds new light onto the ways we think about memory, modernism, postmodernism, feminism. In Enacting Past and Present, author Michaela M. Grobbel discusses novels by Djuna Barnes, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Marguerite Duras. According to the author, these works show us that fascinating shifts in "memory texts" have been taking place in the twentieth century, indicating the need for different approaches to understanding memory. Through a discussion of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and the work of contemporary scholars in feminism and cultural studies, Grobbel focuses on these texts as types of performance that lead to interesting forms of "re-presenting" memory. These theaters of memory foreground the present but also critically demonstrate the complex relationship of the present to the past. Grobbel offers her readers new ways to think about autobiography, performance, and the process of memory, enriching currrent scholarship on feminism and literary modernism.
"Michaela Grobbel's careful and insightful readings of modernist prose texts by Djuna Barnes (Nightwood 1936), Ingeborg Bachmann (Malina 1971), and Marguerite Duras (Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein 1964) explore a 'new feminist art of memory,' that—in contrast to the classical rhetorical art of memory—is centered on the return of the (female) body within the production of memory and writing. . . . This study is particularly relevant in light of the fact that neither the 'gender of memory' nor the aesthetic transposition of memory as inflected by gender have been the focus of recent research. . . . Enacting Past and Present is an insightful, provocative, and discerning contribution to the evolving field of writing, memory, and culture." - The German Quarterly
"Enacting Past and Present invites us to reconsider memory as process and performance; it does so through insightful commentary on three important women's texts; and it makes a convincing case for the importance of restoring the materiality of gender to any such consideration." - Biography
