Description
Book SynopsisThis book addresses the narrative construction of Russian cultural memory in the work of Julian Barnes. It investigates how Barnes''s texts tend to display a memory process as a transcultural mode of the creation of English and Russian national identities. Examining a need to revisit Russian canonical works, the detailed discursive analysis of the selected English texts exposes an intertextual remembering by duplication, thus contributing to the prevention of forgetting through the recuperation of still misrecollected cultural meanings. By creatively incorporating Russian intertextual elements into his work as a novelist, the author seems to insist on sweeping across and beyond national boundaries, revealing how frail the invention of tradition is when leading to the illusion of a solid collective memory and its political legitimation. The book considers not only a constructive dialogue between Barnes's fiction and Russian classical literature, but also this writer's interpretative,
Table of Contents
Introduction: Rethinking literature through memory
Chapter 1: Cultural dimension of literary memory
Chapter 2: Narrative and memory in Julian Barnes
Chapter 3: Patterning transcultural readings of memory
Conclusion: Narrative irresolvability of memory
