Although Samuel Beckett's plays indicate his abiding interest in the complex functioning of memory, little has been written on the topic. The aim of this study, therefore, is to examine the wide-ranging, specific approaches towards recall and forgetting that he reflects in his drama. Because conversational strategies are grounded in cognitive processes, the interplay between memory and discourse will also be probed. The thesis foregrounds Beckett's profound distrust of memory functioning, as well as his conviction that `yesterday' has dangerous power to `deform'. Through his own perception and his psychological study of dysfunctional, decaying and trauma-charged memories, he is able to apply a comprehensive knowledge-base to the creation of his time-damaged characters. In the scrutiny of their autobiographical memories, the reconstructive and imaginative components become apparent. These are mainly shown to alienate characters from one another, so that Beckett's claim that memory can remedy suffering becomes questionable. The investigation is informed by a variety of critical disciplines, as well as insights derived from the Proust Monograph. Beckett's investigation of the psychology of the 1930s is evaluated, in addition to current medical and psychological research into gerontology, amnesia, dementia, and the repressed or obsessive memories of the neurotic. Conway's work on the characteristic features of autobiographical memory illuminates relevant Beckett plays. An appraisal of discourse studies focuses on language and power, phatic communication and the multiple speech acts that reflect the functioning of normal and dysfunctional memory. Reference to the work of Lacan and Derrida enhances discussion of the inadequacy of language. To give due attention to the theatrical component of Beckett's drama, enactment, performance criticism and audience reception of his plays are discussed. / English Studies / D.Litt. et Phil.

Doctorat en Sciences Psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

<p>This study is concerned with subject formation in the fiction of contemporary postcolonial authors Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. In contextualised readings of a total of nine works – Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005); Vera’s Without a Name (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998), and The Stone Virgins (2002); Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993), Turner (1994), and A Harlot’s Progress (1999) – it explores thematic and formal aspects of the subject’s constitution in the texts. Investigating the representation of material and discursive traces that constitute the individual, this study has a double aim. First, it describes the particular historical formations that mould the individual in the different texts. Second, it investigates the tactics used to imaginatively upset these formations in order to present new and more enabling modes of being.</p><p>Gurnah’s fiction depicts the intricate meshwork of social codes, emotions, and narratives that shape subjectivity in a highly unstable and cosmopolitan social reality. His novels repeatedly thematise cultural disorientation, migration, and the efforts of establishing a minimum of social and narrative stability in the form of a home. The chapter reads Gurnah’s fiction against a background of Zanzibari history and diaspora and suggests that various forms of “entanglements” paradoxically provide the means to pull the subject out of states of anxiety and alienation into more viable states of being. Vera’s novels engage a powerful Zimbabwean discourse on history, and the psychic and bodily wounds that result from its violent impact on the subject. Set at moments of special and contested historical importance, her novels address the exclusions and silences of this discourse in order both to assess its effects and the possibilities of imagining alternative versions that would allow other modes of subjectivity. These possibilities are manifested, thematically and textually, through an improvisational form of “movement,” geographical, linguistic, and musical. Dabydeen’s fiction investigates the textual dimensions of identity and its connections to larger cultural archives of tropes and languages. Focusing on the constraining yet constitutive impact of various modes of colonial and racial rhetoric, his literary texts display a manipulation of textual elements from these archives that approaches a re-conception of the subject. To describe this manipulation of English and Caribbean sources, thematised and dramatically staged in his fiction, I am using Dabydeen’s own phrase, “creative amnesia.”</p>

Accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF) is a recently described memory impairment associated with epilepsy. Patients with ALF appear to learn and initially retain new information normally, but forget it at an accelerated rate over subsequent days. ALF can have a profound impact on the lives of the people who suffer from it, but it is also of theoretical interest. In particular, the study of this disorder may provide insight into the mechanisms of memory consolidation. ALF is especially prevalent in transient epileptic amnesia (TEA), an epileptic syndrome in which the seizure focus is thought to be the medial temporal lobes (MTL). The MTL house the hippocampus and a number of other structures critical for declarative memory function. The aims of this doctoral thesis were to investigate which aspects of memory function are disrupted in patients with TEA-associated ALF, and to shed light on the neural basis of the memory impairment. Slow wave sleep (i.e. deep sleep) is known to exacerbate epileptic activity. It is also thought to play a key role in the consolidation of declarative memory. The most commonly posited explanation of ALF is the disruption of sleep- dependent memory consolidation. However, it remains possible that ALF is caused by a subtle problem with encoding that usually goes undetected until delayed memory tests. The results of this thesis demonstrate that sleep can actually benefit memory retention in TEA ALF patients just as much as it does in healthy people, and that it is not necessary for the retention interval to contain sleep in order for ALF to be seen. However, the relationship between slow wave sleep and memory was found to be abnormal in these patients. The amount of slow wave sleep, and the power in the slow oscillation frequency range, during the post-learning night correlated negatively with the benefit of that night of sleep for memory retention. Furthermore, resting-state brain activity patterns thought to reflect post-encoding memory reprocessing were found to correlate negatively with subsequent memory performance in these patients. Another chapter of this thesis provides evidence that TEA ALF patients encode memories abnormally; these patients showed reduced activity in the left hippocampus while viewing stimuli that they went on to forget. Furthermore, this encoding-related brain activity correlated with their long-term forgetting. The final experimental chapter reports a correlation in these patients between grey matter in the left hippocampus and long-term forgetting, which cannot entirely account for the encoding-related brain activity results. The hippocampus and its surrounding structures are thought to be critical to our ability to discriminate between similar stimuli and events. An intriguing hypothesis consistent with the pattern of results in this thesis is that ALF is caused by a functional impairment of the MTL that results in a diminished capacity to distinguish between similar experiences, ultimately causing memory problems; abnormally formed memories may interact with new material and memory consolidation processes in an aberrant manner, leading to retrieval deficits.

Cette thèse de Doctorat tente d’appréhender l’espace dans l’œuvre d’Edouard Glissant. Pour le chantre du « Tout-Monde », l’espace ne peut se limiter à son île natale, la Martinique. En effet, contrairement à la vision occidentale classique de l’insularité, synonyme d’isolement, ce qui sous-tend et nourrit l’œuvre glissantienne est principalement l’appel des autres terres : non seulement l’archipel caribéen, avec lequel la Martinique partage le même passé esclavagiste et la même géographie accidentée, mais aussi l’ensemble de chaque empan du monde. Loin d’être l’île minuscule, perdue au milieu de l’Atlantique, dans l’ombre du continent américain, la Martinique en devient la préface. Bien plus, dans le sillage du « Tout-Monde », l’île antillaise connaît les mêmes dérives et les mêmes défis. La mer devient, de ce fait, le pont qui relie les terres en même temps qu’il aiguillonne l’imagination. Cette nouvelle perception de la mer est loin d’être une contre-verticale, elle est une nécessité. En raison de la traite et de l’amnésie qui lui est associée, l’histoire des « migrants nus » commence désormais avec le bateau négrier. Tout s’articule autour de cette nouvelle matrice, quand bien même elle serait déniée, où s’origine le chavirement permanent entre souffrance particulière et connaissance de l’Autre. Ainsi, au travers du vertige des mornes, des plantations et de l’ « En-ville », la Martinique apparaît comme un vaisseau fantôme qui garde jalousement ses secrets afin de pouvoir continuer à voguer… / This thesis tries to comprehend the space in the work of Edouard Glissant. For the bard of the “all-world”, the space is not limited to his native island, Martinique. Indeed, contrary to the classical westerner view of the insularity, what underlies and feeds the work of Edouard Glissant is mainly the appeal of lands, which means not only the Caribbean archipelago, but also every place in the world. The Martinique which is supposed to be the tiny island, lost in the middle of the Atlantic and kept in American continent’s shadow, becomes the preface of this one. on top of that, in the wake of the ”all-world”, the west Indian island experience the same drifts and the same challenges. Because of that, the sea becomes the link which gathers lands at the same time as it stimulates the imagination. The new sea’s perception is not a counter-vertical, but it is a necessity. Owing to the slave trade and the amnesia which is associated with, the story of the “naked migrants” begins henceforth with the slave ship. Everything is based on this new matrix, whatever it is denied, and in which the eternal swaying between particular suffering and the other’s knowledge has its roots. Thus, through the vertigo of mountains, plantations and the “in-town”, Martinique seems like a ghost vessel which keeps jealously its secrets in order to continue its voyage.

La mémoire épisodique lie différents éléments dans un contexte spatial et temporel particulier. Il a été proposé que lors de la récupération d‟un épisode, la ré-instanciation d‟une cohérence entre les éléments néocorticaux soit opérée grâce à une représentation spatiale allocentrée stockée au niveau de la structure hippocampique (i.e., codage de la position des objets entre eux, indépendamment de la position de l‟individu, Burgess, Becker, King, & O'Keefe, 2001; Nadel & Moscovitch, 1998). Ce travail de thèse propose de traiter la mémoire épisodique et le sentiment de projection dans son passé (i.e., conscience autonoétique) comme une qualité attribuée à une dextérité relative dans le traitement spatial égocentré mis à jour (i.e., la position, orientation et le déplacement de son corps dans l‟environnement). Le rôle des traitements spatiaux allocentrés et égocentrés mis à jour dans la mémoire épisodique a été évalué expérimentalement. Les résultats suggèrent l‟existence d‟un lien causal entre le traitement de la mise à jour égocentré et les performances de mémoire épisodique. De plus, les études ont mis en évidence l‟existence de spécificités cérébrales et comportementales de la mise à jour égocentrée confirmant l‟adéquation de ce traitement au modèle théorique proposé. Par ailleurs, en référence à cette dissociation entre l‟information égocentrée mis à jour et allocentrée, des études neuropsychologiques ont révélé la présence de déficits de la mise à jour égocentrée, et d‟une préservation allocentrée dans l‟amnésie bihippocampique qu‟elle soit acquise ou développementale. Enfin, l‟évaluation des conséquences cérébrales lors de la récupération épisodique d‟un encodage maximisant le traitement égocentré mis à jour a permis de révéler une implication spécifique des structures temporo-pariétales. Ce travail de thèse a été organisé autour d‟un modèle théorique original du fonctionnement de la mémoire épisodique proposant de nouvelles prédictions expérimentales. Les approches comportementale, neuropsychologique et en imagerie fonctionnelle soulèvent à leur tour de nouvelles pistes de recherche sur le lien entre conscience de son corps et mémoire épisodique. / Episodic memory binds various elements in a specific spatial and temporal context. During retrieval, disparate neocortical elements can be re-associated into a coherent episode due to an allocentric spatial context maintained within the hippocampal formation (ie, coding for object-to-object relations, independently of the individual‟s position, Burgess, Becker, King, & O‟Keefe, 2001, Nadel & Moscovitch, 1998). Phenomenological experience is characteristic of episodic memory. In this thesis, it is described as an individual‟s attribution to a fluency in processing egocentric-updating spatial information (i.e., the position, orientation and movement of one‟s body) during retrieval. The function of egocentric-updating and of allocentric spatial processing in episodic memory was assessed experimentally. Results demonstrate the presence of a causal link between egocentric-updating and episodic memory performance. Moreover, experiments showed cerebral and behavioural specificities of egocentric-updating spatial processing supporting its involvement in episodic memory. Additionally, in line with this distinction between allocentric and egocentric-updating spatial processing, neuropsychological experiments revealed deficits in egocentric-updating with a preservation of allocentric spatial processing in both acquired and developemental bi-hippocampal amnesia. Finally, the assessment of cerebral consequences of encoding an episode while maximizing egocentric-updating processes revealed a higher involvement of temporo-parietal regions during the subsequent episodic retrieval. This thesis work was structured over an original theoretical model on episodic memory functioning allowing new experimental predictions. Combining behavioural, neuropsychological and neuroimaging approaches raised in turn new questions concerning links between episodic memory and self-consciousness.

This study is concerned with subject formation in the fiction of contemporary postcolonial authors Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. In contextualised readings of a total of nine works – Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005); Vera’s Without a Name (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998), and The Stone Virgins (2002); Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993), Turner (1994), and A Harlot’s Progress (1999) – it explores thematic and formal aspects of the subject’s constitution in the texts. Investigating the representation of material and discursive traces that constitute the individual, this study has a double aim. First, it describes the particular historical formations that mould the individual in the different texts. Second, it investigates the tactics used to imaginatively upset these formations in order to present new and more enabling modes of being. Gurnah’s fiction depicts the intricate meshwork of social codes, emotions, and narratives that shape subjectivity in a highly unstable and cosmopolitan social reality. His novels repeatedly thematise cultural disorientation, migration, and the efforts of establishing a minimum of social and narrative stability in the form of a home. The chapter reads Gurnah’s fiction against a background of Zanzibari history and diaspora and suggests that various forms of “entanglements” paradoxically provide the means to pull the subject out of states of anxiety and alienation into more viable states of being. Vera’s novels engage a powerful Zimbabwean discourse on history, and the psychic and bodily wounds that result from its violent impact on the subject. Set at moments of special and contested historical importance, her novels address the exclusions and silences of this discourse in order both to assess its effects and the possibilities of imagining alternative versions that would allow other modes of subjectivity. These possibilities are manifested, thematically and textually, through an improvisational form of “movement,” geographical, linguistic, and musical. Dabydeen’s fiction investigates the textual dimensions of identity and its connections to larger cultural archives of tropes and languages. Focusing on the constraining yet constitutive impact of various modes of colonial and racial rhetoric, his literary texts display a manipulation of textual elements from these archives that approaches a re-conception of the subject. To describe this manipulation of English and Caribbean sources, thematised and dramatically staged in his fiction, I am using Dabydeen’s own phrase, “creative amnesia.”

Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-22T20:50:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2013-01-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Associação Fundo de Incentivo à Psicofarmacologia (AFIP) / Pacientes amnésicos apresentam prejuízo na memória anterógrada, com a preservação de outras funções cognitivas. Estudos recentes têm relacionado o efeito de facilitação semântica na recordação livre de palavras e a memória episódica à medidas de capacidade de memória operacional. O componente integrador e consolidador de informações da memória operacional é conhecido por retentor epísódico, a ela é atribuída a responsabilidade de comunicação entre os sistemas de memória de longo prazo. Entretanto, a relação entre estes sistemas de memória, declarativa episódica e operacional, ainda necessita de maiores esclarecimentos. O presente estudo, portanto, buscou analisar a relação entre o retentor episódico e a memória episódica em pacientes amnésicos. Foeam incluídos 15 pacientes amnésicos de diversas etiologias e 13 controles pareados quanto ao sexo, idade e escolaridade. Estes participantes tinham, no mínimo, 9 anos de escolaridade, entre 18-75 anos de idade, sem nenhum outro diagnóstico neurológico, psiquiátrico ou indicativo de abuso de drogas e/ou outras substâncias. Os pacientes foram encaminhados por apresentarem dificuldades predominantes no domínio mnemônico e demais funções cognitivas. Os participantes foram avaliados também, pelo teste de recordação livre de palavras contidas em listas longas(15 palavras) e curtas (7 e 9 palavras) com ou sem palavras semanticamente relacionadas nas posições intermediárias. Os resultados demonstraram que a capacidade de memória operacional parece contribuir para a formação de memória episódica. / TEDE / BV UNIFESP: Teses e dissertações

This is the first full-length study of the writing of the South African Joy Packer (1905-1977), whose 17 works of autobiography and romantic fiction were primarily popular. Packer’s writing, which appeared mainly between 1945 and 1977, blends popular narrative with contemporary social and political discourses. Her first main works, three volumes of memoirspublished between 1945 and 1953, cover her experience of a wide area of the world before,during and after the Second World War: South Africa, Britain, the Mediterranean and theBalkans, and China. In the early 1950s she also toured extensive areas of colonial "DarkestAfrica." When Packer retired to the Cape with her British husband, Admiral Sir Herbert Packer,after an absence of more than 25 years, she adopted fiction as an alternative literary mode. Hersubsequent production, ten popular romantic novels and a further three volumes of memoirs, isnotable for the density of its sociopolitical commentary on contemporary South Africa. This thesis takes as its starting-point the dilemma, formulated by the South African critic Dorothy Driver, of the white woman writing within a colonial environment which compels herto adopt contradictory, ambivalent and oblique discursive stances and strategies. The pragmaticintention of this thesis is, then, to (re)read Packer for her treatment of that problematic in thecontext of South Africa. The approach adopted centres on the reciprocity within Packer’s writing between itsgeneric conventions and its discursive environment, broadly defined here as pre-1950 imperial Britain and, in the main, colonial and apartheid South Africa. Within a critical-biographical frame, attention is paid first to formal aspects of the popular memoir and the popular romanticnovel. Their discursive function vis-à-vis their apartheid environment is then examined withina series of comparative studies. The burden of the analysis rests, in part, on the identity of Packer’s fiction as politicised romans à thèse and, in part, on her personal identification withpolitical liberalism in South Africa, most notably the Cape liberalism of her youth and thevarious manifestations of liberalism under apartheid. By focusing on differing motifs—Packer’sprofessed adherence to political liberalism, her treatment of race within the idealising constructions of popular romance, the metonymy of the fictional family and the patriarchal state,and her portrayal of women held hostage by the racial and masculine other—the study discussesthe extent to which the contradictions predicted by Driver’s analysis exist within the apparentlyseamless fabric of Packer’s narratives. The investigation concludes by recentring its focus on the narrativised identity of the white woman in a colonial environment, at the same time seeking confirmation of the several reasons for Packer’s writing to have gained only contemporary rather than lasting approval. / digitalisering@umu

La plasticité synaptique est une propriété indispensable à l’acquisition de la mémoire chez toutes les espèces étudiées, des invertébrés aux primates. La formation d’une mémoire débute par une phase de plasticité qui inclut une restructuration synaptique ; ensuite elle se poursuit par la consolidation de ces modifications, contribuant à la mémoire à long terme. Certaines mémoires redeviennent malléables lorsqu’elles sont rappelées. La trace mnésique entre alors dans une nouvelle de phase de plasticité, au cours de laquelle certaines composantes de la mémoire peuvent être mises à jour, puis reconsolidées. L’objectif de la présente thèse est d’étudier les mécanismes cellulaires et moléculaires qui sont activés lors du rappel d’une mémoire. Nous avons utilisé un modèle de conditionnement Pavlovien, combiné à l’administration d’agents pharmacologiques et à l’analyse quantitative de marqueurs de plasticité synaptique, afin d’étudier la dynamique de la mémoire de peur auditive chez des rats Sprague Dawley. La circuiterie neuronale et les mécanismes associatifs impliqués dans la neurobiologie de cette mémoire sont bien caractérisés, en particulier le rôle des récepteurs glutamatergiques de type NMDA et AMPA dans la plasticité synaptique et la consolidation. Nos résultats démontrent que le retour de la trace mnésique à un état de labilité nécessite l’activation des récepteurs NMDA dans l’amygdale baso-latérale à l’instant même du rappel, alors que les récepteurs AMPA sont requis pour l’expression comportementale de la réponse de peur conditionnée. D’autre part, les résultats identifient le rappel comme une phase bien plus dynamique que présumée, et suggèrent que l’expression de la peur conditionnée mette en jeu la régulation du trafic des récepteurs AMPA par les récepteurs NMDA. Le présent travail espère contribuer à la compréhension de la neurobiologie fondamentale de la mémoire. De plus, il propose une intégration des résultats aux modèles animaux d’étude des troubles psychologiques conséquents aux mémoires traumatiques chez l’humain, tels que les phobies et les syndromes de stress post-traumatiques. / Synaptic plasticity is necessary for the acquisition of memory in all studied species, from invertebrates to primates. Memory formation starts with a phase of plasticity that entails synaptic remodeling ; then follows the consolidation of these modifications, which contributes to long-term memory. Some memories return to a malleable state upon retrieval. Consequently, the memory trace enters a new phase of plasticity, during which some memory components are eventually updated, then reconsolidated. The aim of the present thesis was to study the cellular and molecular mechanisms that are engaged during memory retrieval. We used a model of Pavlovian conditioning in Sprague Dawley rats, combined to pharmacological manipulations and quantitative analysis of synaptic plasticity markers, in order to study the dynamics of auditory fear memory. The neuronal circuitry and the associative mechanisms involved in the neurobiology of this memory are well characterized, in particular the role of NMDA and AMPA glutamatergic receptors in synaptic plasticity and consolidation. Our results show that the return of the memory trace to lability requires activation of NMDA receptors in the basolateral amygdala during retrieval, whereas AMPA receptors are necessary for the behavioral expression of the conditioned fear response. Furthermore, the data identify retrieval as being much more dynamic than recognized, and suggest that conditioned fear expression involves NMDA receptor-dependent regulation of AMPA receptors’ trafficking. The present work attempts to advance our understanding of the fundamental neurobiology of memory. In addition, it offers an integrative view of the data with regards to animal modeling of human clinical issues related to traumatic memories, like phobias and post-traumatic stress disorders.