Contemporary literature and evolving conceptions of memory's mediative function

Parsons, Katherine ORCID: 0000-0003-0469-4946 (2025). Contemporary literature and evolving conceptions of memory's mediative function. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis examines evolving conceptions of memory and media in contemporary fiction. I read representations of memory and media in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), to argue that the representation of memory in these novels reaches an understanding which is analogous with the ecological view emerging in contemporary memory studies, including that which highlights the particular effects of digital transformations. Ecological memory, a concept which draws particularly from work on ecologies in media studies, cognitive psychology, and memory studies, is broadly defined as the cognitive entanglement of a memoring subject with their environment.
My selection of each of the novels studied in this thesis, written between the early onset of networked digital technologies in 1995 and the post-digital landscape of 2021, is broadly guided by three interrelated criteria: i) the representation of memory objects is thematically, structurally, and/or formally significant; ii) the representation of media other than the novel is similarly thematically, structurally, and/or formally significant; iii) the text engages with the contemporary media landscape in which it was written and published. In showing how these novels depict an ecological model of memory, I demonstrate how this can, in turn, expand the concept as it is currently deployed; in other words, how this fiction (knowingly or otherwise) exhibits an ecological model can be used to extend the understanding of that model.
The first chapter of this thesis argues for reading The Unconsoled as a media novel – whilst acknowledging its anti-media overtones – which depicts memory as the presentification of the narrator’s biography within the physical space of an unknown city. I recognise this spatial disposition of events as a reordering of time representative of an ecological model of memory.
Chapter Two focuses on social meaning-making and linguistic memory objects. This chapter contends that Atwood’s depiction of language as a means of mediating memory in Oryx and Crake demonstrates the embeddedness of linguistic memory objects within a broader ecological system, and the importance of understanding linguistic memory objects as created and encountered within that context.
Chapter Three considers the representation of the re/mediation of events – and particularly of news events – in Falling Man and the role of the novel as a cultural document of or response to a significant contemporary moment. This forms the basis of a study of shared memory objects as an application of an ecological approach to memory.
Chapter Four reiterates that the ecological entangling and re-ordering of the past is not simply a new phenomenon introduced by digital media, but can also be applied to the relationship between memory and media more broadly as a cognitively distributed act. By applying an ecological understanding of memory to Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, this chapter analyses the aspects of the contemporary media landscape which make digital cultures the vantage point from which the concept of ecological memory has been made visible.
By undertaking a detailed analysis of literary representations of memory alongside the ecological model as outlined above, this thesis i) establishes the roots and foundations of this ecological memory and in doing so ii) explores the boundaries of ecological terminology as applied to literary scholarship, iii) illustrates the cultural and phenomenological resonance of this idea through close reading of contemporary novels, and iv) expands the applications of ecological memory beyond its current association with digital media to include literature.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):