This thesis examines the problematic status and functioning of memory in a variety of contemporary contexts such as judicial cases, popular culture, television, memorials and museums. In doing this it develops an account of the culture of postmemory, originally defined by Marianne Hirsch as the experience of descendents of survivors of trauma, particularly second generation Holocaust survivors, who inherit that trauma from their family forbears. From Hirsch, postmemory can be understood as the possibility of remembering an event that one has not actually experienced. This thesis extends Hirsch???s notion of postmemory to account for a wider range of contemporary memory practices. These occur beyond family relationships to manifest in institutional and discursive sites such as the archive, the museum, the narrative and the tourist attraction. This thesis argues that it is in these sites that memory can be seen to be breaking away from its referential function. Instead of recollection, memory becomes the performance of slippage and the undoing of reference in which the fictive and the historical merge. The thesis plays out the ensuing crisis in recollection in scenes and actions of a theatre of the postmemorial ??? one characterised less by the familiar linear narratives of memory as by multiple and contradictory narratives formed through the operations of chance, reflexivity and ambivalence working within the contemporary cultural sphere. Performing Postmemories re-imagines the performances of contemporary memory culture and examines its master texts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/241493 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Trezise, Bryoni, English, Media, & Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Trezise Bryoni., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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