Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories
Abstract
Cristina Iuli
Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale,
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories
Abstract: This paper considers how neo- or trans- Atlantic studies conceives of the Atlantic and its legacies in relation to the idea of the archive, that is, of a body of works related to traces of a trans-Atlantic American past, to its principle of organization and analysis for literary studies, and to the critical descriptions of American Cultures in the context of a long trans-Atlantic network. It addresses how recent works on critical race studies and decoloniality, on performativity and memory and on comparative circum-Atlantic spectrality frame an original way to address how the literary imagination challenges the historical voids produced by modern Western amnesia.
Keywords: trans-Atlantic; archive; critical memory; American literature
Keywords
trans-Atlantic; archive; critical memory; American literature
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Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici Italy
Cristina Iuli teaches American Literature and American Studies at Università del Piemonte Orientale, and at the American Studies Master Program of the University of Torino, Italy. She specializes in Twentieth Century and contemporary American Literature, in literature and science, in the theories and aesthetics of modernity and in literary historiography and Transatlantic American Studies. She is author of Effetti Teorici: critica culturale e nuova storiografia letteraria Americana (2002); Giusto il tempo di esplodere: il romanzo pop di Nathanael West (2004); Spell it Modern: Modernity and the Question of Literature (2009). She has published essays on Gertrude Stein, Gregory Bateson, Richard Powers, Don Delillo, The Big Lebowski, Joseph McElroy, Nathanael West, on Literary history and on Transatlantic American literature in several journals, including Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, The European Journal of English Studies.
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