How can we understand and analyze the primarily unconscious process of writing? In this groundbreaking work of neuro-cognitive literary theory, Ian Lancashire maps the interplay of self-conscious critique and unconscious creativity. Forgetful Muses shows how a writer's own 'anonymous, ' that part of the mind that creates language up to the point of consciousness, is the genesis of thought. Those thoughts are then articulated by an author's inner voice and become subject to critique by the mind's 'reader-editor.' The 'reader-editor' engages with the 'anonymous, ' which uses this information to formulate new ideas. Drawing on author testimony, cybernetics, cognitive psychology, corpus linguistics, text analysis, the neurobiology of mental aging, and his own experiences, Lancashire's close readings of twelve authors, including Caedmon, Chaucer, Coleridge, Joyce, Christie, and Atwood, serve to illuminate a mystery we all share.

How can we understand and analyze the primarily unconscious process of writing? In this groundbreaking work of neuro-cognitive literary theory, Ian Lancashire maps the interplay of self-conscious critique and unconscious creativity. Forgetful Muses shows how a writer's own 'anonymous,' that part of the mind that creates language up to the point of consciousness, is the genesis of thought. Those thoughts are then articulated by an author's inner voice and become subject to critique by the mind's 'reader-editor.' The 'reader-editor' engages with the 'anonymous,' which uses this information to formulate new ideas. Drawing on author testimony, cybernetics, cognitive psychology, corpus linguistics, text analysis, the neurobiology of mental aging, and his own experiences, Lancashire's close readings of twelve authors, including Caedmon, Chaucer, Coleridge, Joyce, Christie, and Atwood, serve to illuminate a mystery we all share.

Although the recent ‘memory boom’ has led to increasing interdisciplinary interest, there is a significant gap relating to the examination of this topic in Classics. In particular, there is need for a systematic exploration of ancient memory and its use as a critical and methodological tool for delving into ancient literature. The present volume provides just such an approach, theorising the use and role of memory in Graeco-Roman thought and literature, and building on the background of memory studies. The volume’s contributors apply theoretical models such as memoryscapes, civic and cultural memory, and memory loss to a range of authors, from Homeric epic to Senecan drama, and from historiography to Cicero’s recollections of performances. The chapters are divided into four sections according to the main perspective taken. These are: 1) the Mechanics of Memory, 2) Collective memory, 3) Female Memory, and 4) Oblivion. This modern approach to ancient memory will be useful for scholars working across the range of Greek and Roman literature, as well as for students, and a broader interdisciplinary audience interested in the intersection of memory studies and Classics.

In A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is “a nation of immigrants,” welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans’ treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others. Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—and lesser-known—such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country’s violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant “aliens” today, particularly along the Mexican border.

In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introduction offer new approaches for the study of Graeco-Roman music and musical culture.

Poetry. Mnemosyne as memory is mother to the nine muses, who bring us forgetfulness of evil and rest from pain, according to the epic poets. But what does the lyric poet do with the mother of the muses, when his language is plosives and assonance erupting from thickets? "This scriptlessness // will be about subsistence, it will become / the centerpiece of a belief," announces Eric Elshtain near the outset of his remarkable first full-length collection, an antic assembly of highly-wrought hymns and Linnaean hexes in which memory narrows and billows, "while we go headlong / to eat the arms of charlatans // rescuing every rickety magician / from salvation."

Greek Memories aims to identify and examine the central concepts underlying the theories and practices of memory in the Greek world, from the archaic period to Late Antiquity, across all the main literary genres, and to trace some fundamental changes in these theories and practices. It explores the interaction and development of different 'disciplinary' approaches to memory in Ancient Greece, which will enable a fuller and deeper understanding of the whole phenomenon, and of its specific manifestations. This collection of papers contributes to enriching the current scholarly discussion by refocusing it on the question of how various theories and practices of memory, recollection, and forgetting play themselves out in specific texts and authors from Ancient Greece, within a wide chronological span (from the Homeric poems to Plotinus), and across a broad range of genres and disciplines (epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, historiography, philosophy and scientific prose treatises).

"A new ethics guideline for caregivers of "deeply forgetful people" and a program on how to communicate and connect based on 30 years of community dialogues through Alzheimer's organizations across the globe"--

Hiroshima claims a crucial yet neglected place in the psychic terrain of our individual and collective memories. Drawing on recent work in depth psychology and Jungian thought, this study explores the ancient art of remembering by envisioning "places" and "images" that are impressed upon the memory. Enthusiastically used by ancient, medieval, and Renaissance explorers of soul and spirit, the art of memory became a profound expression of striving for cultural reform and an end to religious cruelty. Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima shows that images arising from the place of Hiroshima reveal, with stark exactitude, the psychic situation of our world. Specific images are explored that embody unsuspected psychological values beyond their role as reminders of the concrete horror of nuclear war. The process of remembering these images deepens into a commemoration of the fundamental powers at work in the psyche--powers that are critical to the development of a sustained cultural commitment to peace and to the deepening and revitalizing of contemporary psychological life.

Cultural responses to most illnesses differ; dementia is no exception. These responses, together with a society's attitudes toward its elderly population, affect the frequency of dementia-related diagnoses and the nature of treatment. Bringing together essays by nineteen respected scholars, this unique volume approaches the subject from a variety of angles, exploring the historical, psychological, and philosophical implications of dementia. Based on solid ethnographic fieldwork, the essays employ a cross-cultural perspective and focus on questions of age, mind, voice, self, loss, temporality, memory, and affect. Taken together, the essays make four important and interrelated contributions to our understanding of the mental status of the elderly. First, cross-cultural data show the extent to which the aging process, while biologically influenced, is also very much culturally constructed. Second, detailed ethnographic reports raise questions about the behavioral criteria used by health care professionals and laymen for defining the elderly as demented. Third, case studies show how a diagnosis affects a patient's treatment in both clinical and familial settings.; Finally, the collection highlights the gap that separates current biological understandings of aging from its cultural meanings. As Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia continue to command an ever-increasing amount of attention in medicine and psychology, this book will be essential reading for anthropologists, social scientists, and health care professionals.