Mnemonic Migration – Transcultural Transmissions, Translations and Circulations of Memory Across and Into Contemporary

Transcultural transmission, translation and circulation of memory across and into contemporary Europe

This conference aims to explore how memory travels through the aesthetic medium of literature and are translated into new local communities of remembering.

The conference concentrates on the travelling of memories (Erll 2011) within or into the cultural, geographical and symbolic boundaries of Europe, perhaps fostering new knowledge and attention to events that are otherwise marginalized in a Westernized perspective on the European past and identity.

Programme

Wednesday, 27 April

14:00-14:15 Opening
14:15-16:15 Panel 1 Memory, Migration, Materiality
16:15-16:45 Break
16:45-18:15 Panel 2 Reader Positions and Mnemonic Migration

Thursday, 28 April

09:30-11:30 Panel 3 Representation and Circulation of Bosnian War Memories
11:30-12:00 Break
12:00-13:00 Keynote 1 (Astrid Erll) Deep Histories of Mnemonic Migration: An Odyssey
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-16:00 Panel 4 Multidirectional Memory, Connection, Remediation
16:00-16:30 Break
16:30-18:30 Panel 5 Post-Socialist Memory in New Contexts
19:00 Conference dinner

Friday, 29 April

09:30-11:30 Panel 6 Translation and Circulation
11:30-12:00 Break
12:00-13:00 Keynote 2 (Rebecca Walkowitz) Additional Languages: The Translated Fiction of Lahiri and Luiselli
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-16:00 Panel 7 Iceland-Ireland: Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery
16:00-17:00 Closing round table

Panels

 

Chair: Eneken Laanes

  • Asmaa Hassaneen: From Royal Copenhagen to Kitsch Coffee Cups Wealth and Poverty in the Travelling Memories of Palestinian Immigrants in Selected Texts and Interviews
  • John Greaney: Samuel Beckett: Mnemonic Migration, and the Location of Cultural Memory
  • Thomas van de Putte: From Travelling to Travelled Memory
  • Hanna Meretoja: Past Worlds as Spaces of Possibility: Agency and its Limits in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (Visitation)

 

Chair: Barbara Tönquist-Plewa

  • Hanna Teichler: Remembering Forced Labour Migration: Recombinant Selves in Anglophone Literature
  • Jessica Ortner: The Puzzled Reader: Gabs of Indeterminacy in Bosnian War memory
  • Kaisa Kaakinen: Mediation of Local Memories to Heterogeneous Readerships – The Case of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project
  • Rafael Pérez Baquero: Remembering Conflict and Exile Beyond the National Frame: Max Aub’s Depiction of the Spanish Civil War From a Transnational Gaze Pérez Baquero

 

Chair: Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi

  • Aigi Heero: Remembering Višegrad: Memories of Childhood and War in Saša Stanišić’s Novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
  • Dina Abazovic: Where You Come From Under Pressure: Two Novels About the Bosnian War
  • Fedja Wierød Borčak: The Value of Returning Memories: How Memory Accounts by Bosnian-Herzegovinian Émigré Writers are Received in Bosna and Herzegovina
  • Tea Sindbæk Andersen: Transmitting Bosnian war memories into the Danish and British public: circulation and reception of literature of the Bosnian war

 

Chair: Jessica Ortner

  • Colin Davis: The Circulation of Memory From Buchenwald to Stalinism and the Bosnian Genocide: Semprun, Goethe and Carola Neher
  • Unni Langås: Two Stops on the Itinerary of Anne Frank’s Diary
  • Biljana Markovic: Odyssean Memory and the Refugee Crises, Tracing Transcultural and Transtemporal Mnemonic Relationality in Poetry
  • Silvia Riva: Camp Antechambers and Dress Rehearsals: Memories of “Minor” Genocides of the Twentieth Century in Contemporary French-Language Fiction

 

Chair: TBA

  • Eneken Laanes: Katja Petrowskaja’s Translational Poetics of Memory
  • Anja Tippner “People Would Close Their Eyes to Think Back to a Past and Tell Untruths About It Until They Were True”: Literature After Memory Studies and Migratory Aesthetics
  • Anita Pluwak: Red Princess, Black Widow and Other Stories: Popular Reception of Political (Auto)biographies from Postsocialist Poland
  • Jan Schwarz The Historical Novel as World Literature of Memory in Contemporary Europe: Olga Tokarczuk’s Kiegi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob, 2014)

 

Chair: Fedja Wierød Borčak

  • Mónika Dánél: Shared Memories – Remediation as Accented Reading
  • Una Tanović: On Prosthetic Memories and Phantom Limbs: Self-Translation and Pseudotranslation in Bekim Sejranović’s Tvoj sin Huckleberry Finn/Din sønn, Huckleberry Finn (2015) and Alen Mešković’s Ukulele jam (2011) 
  • Stijn Vervaet: Translating Memories of the Bosnian War: Translingual Writers as Memory Brokers
  • Jakob Lothe: Variants of Memory and Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

 

Chair: Tea Sindbæk Andersen

  • Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir: Iceland – Ireland: Transnational Memories of Crises in Álfrún Gunnlaugsdóttir’s Siglingin um síkin and Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth
  • Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir: The Past That Never Was: Sjón and Jamie O’Neill’s Queer Historical Fiction
  • Fionnuala Dillane: Crimes on the Atlantic Periphery: Irish and Icelandic Writings From the Edge

 

 

 

Organisers

The conference is organized in cooperation between the joined research project Mnemonic Migration: Transnational Circulation and Reception of Wartime Memories in post-Yugoslav Migrant Literature (Independent Research Fund Denmark, Jessica Ortner, Tea Sindbæk Andersen) and the ERC project Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena (project leader Eneken Laanes).