Response to three articles on contemporary academic discourse

¶ … Wang, Q., & Brockmeier, J. (2002). Autobiographical remembering and cultural practice:

Understanding the interplay between memory, self and culture. Culture and Memory, 8(1), 45-64.

Autobiographical memory is a critical component of how an individual defines his or her sense of self in Western culture: the stories we remember and tell ourselves define how we see ourselves as human beings. According to Wang & Brockmeier (2002), not all cultures conceive of memory in such a personal and individualistic fashion: when asked to recollect a memory from childhood, Chinese undergraduates were more inclined to talk about collective experiences (Wang & Brockmeier 2002: 49). A more dependent and less individualistic concept of the self within a culture conspires to create different memories. Memories are not absolute and static, even highly personal ones; they are culturally contextual. Chinese residents even have later recollected memories than their American counterparts. "Personal remembering in these cultures evokes and preserves an important social orientation that serves to engage individuals in ongoing relationships and further reinforces the idea of one's self as an interdependent entity" (Wang & Brockmeier 2002: 52). Memory is not only an intensely subjective process: it also reveals as much about culture as the self.

The U.S.-Chinese cultural differences regarding memory likely lies in the parent-child relationship. Parents shape the trajectory of their children's recollections. Chinese parents are more apt to shape their children's memories with directive questioning than to permit the children to embellish their recollections and thus "American children frequently provide more event information than do their Chinese peers during family memory-sharing" (Wang & Brockmeier 2002: 56). Once again, this underlines how autobiographical memory is not a cross-cultural construct but something which is shaped by specific, culturally bound forces and which impacts the child's sense of his or her autonomy vs. his or her place in a larger society. For American children, individuality and a unique personal perspective is affirmed in a way it is not in more collectively oriented cultures.

Memory article review:

Fernyhough, C. (2012). The Martha Tapes (chapter 101). Pieces of Light, Kondon, UK: Harper.

"The Martha Tapes" chronicle the times Fernyhough (2012) interviewed his Jewish Lithuanian-born grandmother to gain a better sense of her history and past. Martha suffered persecution as a young woman under the shadow of Nazism, raised many children and grandchildren, and eventually settled into a comfortable life in England. Fernyhough notes that while Martha was often asked to recall the past by other members of the family, by interviewing her he has a specific agenda to recapture it accurately and elicited different memories. Contrary to the notion that the memory of the elderly is simply 'bad,' he believes that the old often have the ability to live in the past in a way the young do not, even though their short-term memory may be less acute (Fernyhough 2012: 210).

As well as discussing the life of his grandmother, Fernyhough also muses about the nature of memory in general, such as the idea that time seems to go by faster, the older one gets, as if the most significant events in life take place when we are young and also the fact that events which occur when we are young are a more significant proportion of one's life (Fernyhough 2012: 214). However, physiological changes in the brain are also responsible for the different ways in which we perceive time.

Martha's patterns of memory are used as examples of how memory shifts and changes in quality over the years. Older people may mistake memories that are from movies (or were other individual's) as their own; memories may be less vivid than they were in the past; older people may think less of the future. All of these indicate the impermanent and changing nature of memory. It is very difficult to determine exactly what happened in the past purely from memory although it is possible that future generations of people will have more referent documents to enhance their memories given the ubiquity of digital photography and video and social media to preserve a day-to-day record of memory.

Film review: Memento (2000)

Director Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2000) chronicles the struggle of the main protagonist to find the killer of his wife, even though he suffers from a condition which makes it impossible to allow him to form new long-term memories. Over the course of the narrative it becomes clear that he was her killer. But when the private investigator (Teddy) Lenny hired to help him get to the bottom of his wife's death tries to convince him of the truth, Lenny effectively sets a trap for his future self, writing not to trust Teddy on a Polaroid. After forgetting what Teddy told him, Lenny kills Teddy, thus giving him a sense of closure, even though he knows (or at least his past self knew) that this was not the truth.