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It is difficult to write with precision about Cecil Maurice Bowra's life as a soldier. The War was clearly a determining experience, and yet the evidence which might describe it is sadly thin. Like so many others, he rarely talked of the War, when he so readily talked of everything else. Few letters survive, and the chapter in Memories which covers these years is a heavily sanitized account. The misery of what he saw and heard had to be blotted out. Instead, he recalled the moments of humour, the comradeship, and the boredom. Only very occasionally, to a close friend, would the mask slip. Late in life, he confessed to George Richardson that, to understand what the Great War was like, ‘think how bad it could possibly be, and then be sure it was very much worse’.

Cecil Maurice Bowra went up to New College in the spring of 1919, shortly after demobilization. He had been to Oxford twice before: once when, early in 1916, he had visited the city in order to take entrance examinations, and once in the autumn of the same year as a soldier in the local Officer Training Corps (OTC). According to Memories, these short periods of residence were enough to convince him that the city had everything any man could wish for: the city ‘laid its hold on me, and I formed a picture of it which I found comforting in the months to come’. As a future tutor, professor, and vice chancellor, he would of course come to realize that, in many ways, Oxford would fall short of being paradise, but traces of a romanticized vision of the place would never leave him. It gave him nearly everything he required from life.

This very short chapter works as a sort of homage to McGahern the generous friend, writer and interviewee. Taking as a starting point an interview conducted by Melvyn Bragg for the then newly-formed BBC2, in 1966, the chapter throws light on those early years when McGahern was merely a newcomer. It gives glimpses into McGahern’s personality, as well as the interest and respect he invoked in others, but mostly it offers memories of moments, places, people, phrases uttered – all of which bring alive both McGahern the writer and the man at the beginning of his writing life.

Much research on “comfort food” focuses on the emotional and physiological effect of consuming food in order to positively arouse emotions or relieve negative psychological states. This paper focuses on the role of memory in comfort (and discomfort) food by comparing key cinematic food scenes with essays reflecting on foods laden with emotional, autobiographical, and symbolic significance (aka Proust’s “madeleine”). Film’s ability to juxtapose image and sound—ingestion and associated flashbacks—renders the medium uniquely adept at representing organoleptic properties, the emotional weight of eating, social surrogacy, and food’s profound ability to evoke memories both positive and negative. 

This chapter considers two films on the Iraq War: HBO’s documentary Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq (2007) and Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah (2007). Both place physical and mental trauma and the homecomings they engender in the glare of the spotlight. In Alive Day, this glare is literal, as James Gandolfini interviews ten veterans whose disabilities range from triple amputation to severe traumatic brain injury and are shown unveiled by dim lighting, camera angles, or concealing clothing. Elah follows a father’s quest to uncover the circumstances of the death of his son, who was killed while AWOL in America. As the film progresses, the father pieces together fragments of a portrait of combat trauma and its aftermath that is finally rendered tragically clear.

This chapter examines Alfred Russel Wallace's My Life and Francis Galton's Memories of My Life. My Life has many of the qualities of Charles Darwin's autobiography. Galton's narrative represents another version of the tradition of dying to know, for there is little evidence of the modesty Wallace exhibits. He describes his life so as to imply that the denial of self makes strict scientific sense. His project is to enhance on natural selection. Memories of My Life supplies a clear example of what it means to embody objectivist methodology and theory in narrative. The autobiographies of John Stuart Mill, Wallace and Galton provide examples of what happens when scientific epistemology is overtly dramatized in narrative; and clearly, the consequences are different, but the fate of the self remains similar.

This chapter argues that the historical relic cannot be understood apart from the specifically nineteenth-century form of the sentimental memento. Like the memento, the relic was bound up with sentimental structures of feeling. It was designed to evoke “memories” of the historical past, to create bonds of sympathy between the living and the dead, and to unite the living in a community of shared feeling. Mementoes—and by extension relics—should also be understood as a material means of channeling affect. They allowed their users to physically engage with the body of the one being remembered, to merge the physical boundaries of the rememberer and the remembered, and to affirm mutual commitments. They were efficacious objects, things that could effect changes in the self’s relational world that could not take place without them.

This paper argues that the Other Korean Warin Viet Nam hardly means foregrounding Asians solely as victims or noblenatives. Such re-centering means acknowledging the full subjectivity of Asians, includingtheir agency, their complicity, their cruelty, and their own strategic designs forpower and profit at the expense of the weaker ones in their own societies and theirenemies and neighbors. HowKorea deals with Viet Nam of the present, the Viet Nam of its past, and the shadowof its American patron has everything to do with Korea’s transformation from oneof the world’s backwater provinces, humiliated by Japan and subordinated by theUnited States, to a chic and sleek global minipower whose projection of itself takesplace notonly in the factory, the boardroom, the stock market, and the UnitedNations, but in movie theaters, on family televisions, in the hands of readers, and inarchitecture signifying might and prowess, meant to intimidate and impress bothcitizen and tourist.

This chapter outlines focus group research to gather information about the health and advice needs of older people living on a council estate in Bristol, UK. It also captured memories and experiences of older people living on the estate which reveals dimensions of the estate’s changing identity.

Reviewing You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,A. O. Scott asked, “Does [Allen] take any pleasure in making these movies? Does he expect the audience to take any?” Scott’s question opens this epilogue’s discussion of whether Allen’s film art of the twenty-first century remains “reluctant” in the sense that the book’s first twenty chapters argued it is. Citing numerous passages from Allen’s films as evidence, the epilogue concludes that Allen’s art is still reluctant, because filmmaking and its artistic and cultural rewards have provided him with nothing approaching compensation for or transcendence of his mortality.

This chapter argues for a complex spatialisation of time and memory in Grant Gee’s essay film Innocence of Memories (2019). Focusing on issues of narrative, the indexical and memory, the author sees Gee’s film functioning in multiple registers, principally as a kind of palimpsest, referring to and writing over Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2009) and also referencing in multi-layered and intricate ways the real museum of the same name, located prominently in the centre of Istanbul. Both film and novel, as Tim O’ Farrell shows in an extended reading of the works, straddle a deep love of the past, a desire to preserve and understand it, and a fascination with the inexorability of time, transformation and notions of progress. Fact and fiction are thereby multiply entangled, produced by and supporting the disjunctive practice and interstitiality of the essay film, as the author points out with reference to Laura Rascaroli’s theoretical work How the Essay Film Thinks (2017).

This chapter recounts the author's experience working in a used bookstore. It describes the everyday tasks of a clerk and observations of those who habit bookstores. It also reflects on our attitude towards books.

Nguyen Viet and Duc are likely the most famous Vietnamese in Japan, with the possible exception of the modern nation’s founder, Ho Chi Minh himself. Viet and Duc, conjoined twins who were likely the victims of in utero Agent Orange contamination, had received life-saving medical treatment in Tokyo in 1986, two years before the surgery to separate them in Vietnam, with Japanese support. Viet remained in a coma after that 1988 operation, finally dying in 2007, while Duc has emerged as a living symbol of Vietnamese-Japanese relations. This chapter examines this episode and its aftermath, tracing the ways in which a broad national narrative shaped views of Japan’s changing place in an Asian international order.

Circus in the subcontinent is embedded with the arrival of the modern and the recasting of body and its caste and gender structures; new trans-cultural and transnational spaces that emerged with this itinerant entertainment; technologies of the tent; and the acquisition, taming, and training of animals whose past is deeply implicated in the history of hunting, wildlife management, and forest policies of the colonial and post-colonial states in India. Subcontinental regions such as Kerala and Maharashtra have rich histories of circus acrobatics and animal training that span over a century. However, autobiographies, personal histories, and memoirs are very rare. While looking at the history of Indian circus, the major challenge is the lack of archival sources, both public and private. Memories and memorabilia of the circus community have been rich sources for the author. The book explores some key moments and aspects in the different spaces of the circus in this part of the world, spanning over a hundred years.

Chapter 7, ‘Remembering East Africa’, reflects on how migration is remembered, and how remembering or forgetting shape individual and collective memories and identities. East African Goans often recall their lives in East Africa as having been the ‘best time’ of their lives, often silencing contentious experiences related to race, class, and gender. Many still regard East Africa nostalgically as ‘home’ and have ambivalent perspectives on return visits. Often, reunions have functioned as catalysts to help first generation migrants to live with a present that is perceived as ‘uncomfortable’. The interviews illustrate very clearly that how life in East Africa is remembered differs between second and third generation East African Goans now living in the UK, Canada, Goa, or East Africa.

This introductory chapter examines an excerpt of C. G. Jung’s dream of flying instruments of projection in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Metaphors derived from modern philosophical instruments such as telescope, camera obscura, and magic lantern are used as projective apparatuses for the actions of the unconscious part of the mind. The chapter sets out the Scenes of Projection as a structured exercise of narrating the readings from the image projection, and is later used for conducting psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud had also contributed to the realization of the subject matter.

This chapter begins with a discussion of “Fragments of the Forgotten War” and “Still Present Pasts,” which demonstrate how Korean American cultural producers suggest the link between America’s imperial presence in Korea, and the gendered racial “return” of the Korean subject back to the imperial center. It cites Susan Choi’s novel The Foreign Student, Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel Memories of My Ghost Brother, and Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary First Person Plural—all of which offer a troubling interpretation of the Korean War. The Korean War indicates a wider problem of Cold War knowledge that affects both American nationalist discourse and Korean America’s public knowledge regarding the conditions of possibility for its formation in the post-1945 situation.

The epilogue examines the 2011 human rights march in Buenos Aires on the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice (Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), the anniversary of the start of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). It analyzes the author’s participation with Oduduwá Danza Afroamericana (Oduduwá Afro-American Dance), a group that brought together scores of volunteers to perform choreography based in Orishá dance. Orishá dance’s Yoruban origins and connection to the African diaspora made it an unexpected addition to the demonstration given the construction of Argentina as exceptionally white among Latin American nations. The group strove to connect Orishá dance’s link to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with Argentina’s history of political disappearance, as well as the country’s own violence against Afro-Argentines. Oduduwá’s project reiterates the importance of dance as both a political practice and one linked to memory.