Time and the literary: the immediacy of information technology has supposedly annihilated both. Email, cell phones, satellite broadcasting seem to have ended the long-standing tradition of encoding our experience of time through writing. Paul de Man's seminal essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" and newly commissioned essays on everything from the human genome to grammatical tenses argue, however, that the literary constantly reconstructs our understanding of time. From eleventh-century France or a science-fiction future, Time and the Literary shows how these two concepts have always been and will continue to be entwined.

Conflicts in Feminism proposes new strategies for negotiating and practicing conflict in feminism. Noted scholars and writers examine the most critically divisive issues within feminism today with sensitivity to all sides of the debates. By analyzing how the debates have worked for and against feminism, and by promoting dialogue across a variety of contexts, these provocative essays explore the roots of divisiveness while articulating new models for a productive discourse of difference.

In this collection of essays, 13 foreign exchange students write their compelling stories detailing their experiences studying at Dartmouth College. They not only convey their own joys and sorrows, but illuminate U.S. culture from a perspective not seen by many American students or citizens.

Contents:
Contributors include: Elizabeth Abel, King-Kok Cheung, Mary Childers, Nancy Cott, Teresa de Lauretis, Diane Ehrensaft, Carla Freccero, Jane Gallop, Evelyn Hammonds, Bell Hooks, Peggy Kamuf, Katie King, Tom Laqueur, Marni Lazreg, Helen Longio, Nancy Miller, Martha Minow, Sara Ruddick, Joan Scott, Valerie Smith, Ann Snitow and Michelle Stanworth.

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even in repressive historical and political contexts. School Photos in Liquid Time offers a closer look at this genre of vernacular photography, tracing how photography advances ideologies of social assimilation as well as those of hierarchy and exclusion. In Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer's deft analysis, school photographs reveal connections between the histories of persecuted subjects in different national and imperial centers. Exploring what this ubiquitous and mundane but understudied genre tells us about domination as well as resistance, the authors examine school photos as documents of social life and agents of transformation. They place them in dialogue with works by contemporary artists who reframe, remediate, and elucidate them. Ambitious yet accessible, School Photos in Liquid Time presents school photography as a new access point into institutions of power, revealing the capacity of past and present actors to disrupt and reinvent them.

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.

This volume examines the ways that writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. theorize and employ postcolonial memory in ways that expose or challenge colonial narratives of the past, and shows how memory assumes particular forms and values in post/colonial contexts in twenty and twenty-first-century works. The problem of contested memory and colonial history continues to be an urgent and timely issue, as colonial history has served to crush, erase and manipulate collective and individual memories. Indeed, the most powerful mechanism of colonial discourse is that which alters and silences local histories and even individuals' memories in service to colonial authority. Johnson and Brezault work to contextualize the politics of writing memory in the shadow of colonial history, creating a collection that pioneers a postcolonial turn in cultural memory studies suitable for scholars interested in cultural memory, postcolonial, Francophone and ethnic studies. Includes a foreword by Marianne Hirsch.

Family photographs preserve ancestral history & perpetuate memories. Indeed, photography has become the family's primary means of self-representation. In Family Frames Hirsch uncovers both the deception and the power behind this visual record.

In modern-day Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the 'Vienna of the East' under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II - yet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore - but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Hirsch and Spitzer present the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language and offer a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

Mothers and daughters -- the female figures neglected by classicpsychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative -- are at the center of thisbook. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the WesternEuropean and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remainsthe unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, morecontroversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both thefamilial structures basic to traditional narrative -- the Oedipus story -- and thenarrative structures basic to traditional representations of the family -- Freud'sfamily romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation withnarrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation offemale family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even in repressive historical and political contexts. School Photos in Liquid Time offers a closer look at this genre of vernacular photography, tracing how photography advances ideologies of social assimilation as well as those of hierarchy and exclusion. In Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer's deft analysis, school photographs reveal connections between the histories of persecuted subjects in different national and imperial centers. Exploring what this ubiquitous and mundane but understudied genre tells us about domination as well as resistance, the authors examine school photos as documents of social life and agents of transformation. They place them in dialogue with works by contemporary artists who reframe, remediate, and elucidate them. Ambitious yet accessible, School Photos in Liquid Time presents school photography as a new access point into institutions of power, revealing the capacity of past and present actors to disrupt and reinvent them.

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University

Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of "A Million Little Pieces," the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers' claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, "How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it's true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, 'This is really true'? Why do they choose to say it then?"
The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of nonfiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.
Contributors: John D'Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray Gonzalez, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer

Questions of female development shape women's studies in many fields as women seek to define those forces which mold their experiences. Surprisingly, this is the first book to study systematically and from a comparative perspective the female novel of development, or Bildungsroman. Prevailing definitions of the Bildungsroman derive from the conceptions of development based on male experience. The book offers an expanded generic model that incorporates the distinctively female patterns of realization and failed realization which emerge from the limited social opportunities depicted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and from the particular features of women's maturation as revealed by recent feminist psychoanalytic research.

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University

In modern-day Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the 'Vienna of the East' under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II - yet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore - but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Hirsch and Spitzer present the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language and offer a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.

Time and the literary: the immediacy of information technology has supposedly annihilated both. Email, cell phones, satellite broadcasting seem to have ended the long-standing tradition of encoding our experience of time through writing. Paul de Man's seminal essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" and newly commissioned essays on everything from the human genome to grammatical tenses argue, however, that the literary constantly reconstructs our understanding of time. From eleventh-century France or a science-fiction future, Time and the Literary shows how these two concepts have always been and will continue to be entwined.

"Can the story be told?" Jorge Semprun asked after his liberation from Buchenwald. The question is addressed from many angles in this volume of essays on teaching about the Holocaust. In their introduction, Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes argue that Semprun's question is as vital now, and as difficult and complex, as it was for the survivors in 1945. The thirty-eight contributors to Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust come from various disciplines (history, literary criticism, psychology, film studies) and address a wide range of issues pertinent to the teaching of a subject that many teachers and students feel is an essential part of a liberal arts education. This volume offers approaches to such works as Jurek Becker's Jacob the Liar, Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, Anne Frank's diary, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, Dan Pagis's "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car," Art Spiegelman's Maus, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Elie Wiesel's Night, and Abraham Yehoshua's Mr. Mani. To the challenge "How do we transmit so hurtful an image of our own species without killing hope and breeding indifference?" posed by Geoffrey Hartman in this volume, the editors respond, "Only in the very human context of classroom interaction can we hope to avoid either false redemption of unending despair."

This rich anthology of writings in French by twentieth-century women presents a dazzling array of literary treasures. The editors, all distinguished specialists in French studies, have expanded the boundaries of French literary terrain beyond France, Belgium, and Switzerland to North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and French Canada. These compelling poems, short stories, essays, memoirs, and novels (some complete and others excerpts), represent thirty-one contemporary authors, including Colette, Mariama Ba, Maryse Conde, Joyce Mansour, Renee Vivien, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hebert. Exploring issues and experiences of universal interest from women's perspectives, this collection focuses first on themes of relationships (both personal and political) and how violence breaks them apart, and second on the ways in which identity is influenced by race, language, nationality, and sexuality. The book, which is entirely in French, includes biographical sketches of each author as well as a critical introduction to each section that invites comparisons among the writers' diverse views on such themes as parenting, love, marriage, political and interpersonal power, existence, the process of becoming a writer, and the formation of an identity in a polyphonic and pluralistic world.