Immortal Longings: F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death

Subjectivity in memoir allows room for the manipulation of identity and the reflection of how one’s identity has been manipulated. When breaches of human dignity occur, the discourse of trauma becomes an integral part of one’s identity. How then does socioeconomic background integrate with the traumatized self? Looking at the Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov as an example of a male, upper-class, immigrant memoir in relation to immigrant memoirs of different socioeconomic classes, like Wole Soyinka's You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying, the implicit and explicit expressions of trauma within each author’s narrative and the emphasis of certain content, like grammatical and narrative structure, tone and transitions often correlate to each author’s background. As classes continue to divide, this analysis begins a conversation of how socioeconomic ideals become ingrained in the writer’s positioning of self, though the human rights narrative remains universal. INDEX WORDS: Trauma memoir, Socioeconomic status, Human dignity, Immigrant memoir, Privilege, Human rights “I FELT ALL THE PANGS OF EXILE”: TRAUMA AND THE FIGHT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE MEMOIRS OF NABOKOV, SOYINKA, AND DANTICAT

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“I Felt All the Pangs of Exile”: Trauma and the Fight for Human Rights in the Memoirs of Nabokov, Soyinka, and Danticat

Jensen offers a detailed examination of the temporal narrative swerves that appear in much autobiographical literary nonfiction composed in the aftermath of traumatic experience: memoirs, letters, diaries, and essays. Uniquely in the case of posttraumatic stress disorder, one can not only recall a past event but also reexperience it fully in both mind and body. Flashbacks bring the past viscerally into the present. Drawing on the latest neuroscientific findings on the interactions of “time cells” and memory in posttraumatic brains, Jensen demonstrates how an analysis of nonfiction works by Vladimir Nabokov, JG Ballard, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, and Julia Alvarez alongside these scientific findings adds to and complicates our understanding of the temporal narrative dynamics through which painful experience can be negotiated in the aftermath of trauma. Moreover, it will posit one possible origin for each of these writer’s emblematic representations of a complex trope: the body in time.

Time, Body, Memory: The Staged Moment in Posttraumatic Letters, Journals, Essays, and Memoirs

As he prepared to write his autobiography, Vladimir Nabokov turned to the work of Victorian investigator of the paranormal, Frederic W. Myers. Myers’s concept of layered selfhood illuminates otherwise obscure connections between Nabokov’s treatment of immortality, family relationships, human evolution and sensory perception. Reading Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited in dialogue with Myers’s ideas points to a close engagement by Nabokov with the debates on the self in time that occurred on the cusp of the twentieth century. It brings to light the subtleties of the autobiography’s critique of Freud and nuances views of the text’s temporal structures as Bergsonian. The new view of Nabokov and Myers that emerges from reading the Nabokov archive suggests the possibility of fruitful interactions between genetic criticism and the history of ideas.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.39.4.03

Contesting the Unconscious: Frederic W. Myers and Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Abstract This essay demonstrates how a progressive era Radcliffe College student (1910-1914) who earned the title “strongest woman” for her athletic feats used the unique genre affordances of the scrapbook to assert an identity that at once aligned with and contradicted dominant rhetoric about women’s bodies and education. Drawing on archived personal artifacts, the essay argues that Eleanor Stabler Brooks used this vernacular, multigenre, multivocal genre in a way that amplifies the material and the visceral through a process of bricolage, composing an embodied response to the social and institutional restrictions on her body at a time when gender values were radically destabilizing.

Sara-Louise Cooper

Papers

Contesting the Unconscious: Frederic W. Myers and Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Radcliffe’s Strongest Woman: The Bricolaged Body in One Progressive Era Women’s College Scrapbook