History memory essay

Fiction allows authors to explore and deposit memory, and readers can draw upon their own memories to evoke their own past experiences; and to an extent it allows the negation of power structures that determine what history can be told by whom in a way that sometimes oral history cannot.

A theme that runs throughout the entire collection – or ‘haunts’ the volume as Tumblety puts it (like a spectre perhaps?) – is the problematic notion of collective memory. In Lindsey Dodd’s chapter on French oral history during the Second World War (by far the best essay in the book), the author emphasises the importance of ‘cultural scripts’.

We all have lots of beautiful memories from our childhood that make us extremely happy. 2. This memory recalls are priceless and everyone loves to talk about them. 3. I have some exciting memories of my own childhood. 4. We were living in a village when I was a kid. I spent my entire childhood there. 5.

Edward Behrendt’s commentary supports the validity of individual and personal history as ‘lived’ experience. The relationship between history and memory is complex and intricate. Memory is the central unifying force of human identity, while history records this force.