Prosthetic Memory: Storytelling, Object, Techonology, and Film

• Main Authors: Yu-Chun Huang, 黃郁純
• Other Authors: Simon Stevenson
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/21395017364633386528

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 創作與英語文學研究所 === 96 === There is a history of literature and film concerned with the fluidity and changeability of memory. I am interested in questions such as: how do memories change over time? What happens when the technology develops to be able to interfere with memories? What if one could easily access to someone else’s memories? To begin with the idea ‘Prosthetic Memory’ from Alison Landsberg, a memory that one has of an event or experience that one did not actually live through that nevertheless has an effect on how one thinks about one’s self and one’s history, I move from the cultural use to the different subjects of these prosthetic memories. In the first chapter ‘In a Hotel Garden: Story and Storytelling’, we see the impossibility of understanding what is happening while we are in the middle of it, and how memory is being constantly rewritten and revised. In the second chapter ‘Objects and Memory’, I will turn to objects and the prosthetic memories that they ‘hold’. We focus on how souvenir functions as an incompleteness that eventually replaces the ‘original’ memory but again also opens up a space for a narrative supplement. The third chapter ‘Snow: Memory and Technology‘ deals with the technology of reproduction and recording by which prosthetic memories are created and transmitted. We introduce the idea of the ‘crypt’ of Abraham and Torok and suggested the technologies of memoralization can actually be detrimental to the psyche, blocking the process of what Nietzsche calls ‘active forgetting’. Finally, the fourth chapter “Blade Runner: Memories of the City” deals with artificially implanted memories of others. As the film is keen to question if memory can ever ‘belong’ to anybody, I introduced another thinking about time and past in Bergson’s formulation of the pure past.