| dc.description.abstract | Novels of the twentieth century are grappling with the questions of identity in relation to history, but a self-reflexive history, a history that is always suspicious of itself. Alienated from cultural, religious and physical identities, we try to find this identity in the inanimate dust of memory, like architecture or the material debris of lived lives, to discover our own place and ground our identities. Therefore, we live in a time of memory. This work draws upon Vico's notion of the True and the Certain, Derrida's conceptualization of the Archive as a metaphorical construct, and the body as the locus of memory and language and applies these concepts to Thomas Pynchon's V. and Toni Morrison's Beloved. These two canonical works provide a case study for the cultural function of memory in the novels of the twentieth century. The elements of memory are corporeally manifested in the body of the title characters whose function is the same, to mirror this process of the archival function within the realms of narrative. They represent the connection between mere thought and physical manifestation, the dead come to life, the word made flesh. Archives in the literal sense and the archive as a metaphor define an emerging and expanding area of inquiry across many disciplines. This work attempts to extend the tendrils of archival theory into American literary criticism by identifying "archival characters." | |
