Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

Discourse in the Novel

Catriona Mackenzie and Jacqui Poltera’s discussion of narrative integration and identity takes up a wide range of issues. It advances objections against Galen Strawson’s critique of narrative identity and defends both the claim that some narrative conception of identity can capture descriptively the ways in which human agents experience and make sense of their lives and also the claim that some form of narrative self-interpretation is required for a fulfilling, well-lived life. In defending these claims, Mackenzie and Poltera appeal, in part, to Elyn Saks’s autobiographical account of her long, on-going struggle with schizophrenia and the significance of this struggle for her selfunderstanding (Saks 2007). According to the authors,

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On narrative identity

The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age Daniel J. Solove. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 290 pp. $29.95.Daniel J. Solove, like most contemporary writers on privacy, offers a sky-is-falling perspective on privacy in the modern paperless, transactional age. Due in part to the rise of so-called "digital dossiers" and perhaps, in the opinion of the reviewer, due in part to apathy, Solove observes recent developments as a new paradigm of the privacy problematic. The goal is "to rethink longstanding notions of privacy to grapple with the consequences of living in an information age" (p. 2). Much of what is covered here is not new. As Solove comments in his introduction: "There are hundreds of companies that are constructing gigantic databases of psychological profiles, amassing data about an individual's race, gender, income, hobbies, and purchases" (p. 2). Although the combination of private and public information "has long been viewed as problematic" (p. 6), Solove never adequately explains why or moves beyond the obvious: Marketing, credit, and related research companies have been engaging in such practices for years; in fairness to Solove, perhaps the difference is capacity to collect, to share, to compile, etc. This is the power of "aggregation" which contributes to the inability to assign adequate value to personal information. Though Solove does not make the connection, this may be a key to understanding the power of apathy or more kindly the unawareness that immobilizes individual responses to personal privacy protection. What is new is that "beyond articulating a new understanding of contemporary privacy problems" Solove attempts "to demonstrate the ways that the problems can be solved" (p. 6). After observing traditional conceptualizations such as big brother (Orwellian, pp. 29-35), secrecy and invasion (though he uses the idea of invasion to describe both), Solove claims to use a new Kafkaesque metaphor of irresponsible bureaucracy (pp. 36-41).On the way to this metaphor, Chapter 2 recounts the rise of public and private sector databases and the new uses of the web as a point and source of data collection. Chapter 3 reviews various metaphors and views the ultimate harm as one affecting human dignity through misjudgments, diminished capacity to participate, and unfairness (perhaps unevenness is more descriptive) in the collection of information. Chapter 4 reviews the inadequacy of the private (traditional tort and more recent statutory sector by sector approaches) and public law of privacy in the United States. …

The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age

What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion

This article argues that David Clark’s digital biography 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) (2008) meets all the criteria of a writerly/plural text as defined by Roland Barthes in S/Z (1970). The discussion focuses on the interactive and reversible structure of Clark’s work, as well as on the plurality and hybridity of its components. The experimental form of Wittgenstein’s biography is examined as an attempt to capture the elusiveness and the contradictions of its subject.

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"A galaxy of signifiers”: David Clark’s "88 Constellations" for Wittgenstein as a Paradigm of the Barthesian Writerly/Plural Text

It has become a critical consensus that microfictions (or flash fictions) are particularly suited to the age of social media. In his attempt to theorise the genre, William Nelles (2012) allows for a wide range of narrative and thematic possibilities but maintains that, because of their radical brevity, flash fictions need to renounce characterisation, reader empathy and identification. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the generic limitations specified by Nelles can be transcended. By examining a selection of microfictions by David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, the article argues that flash fictions can evoke projective empathy and become a successful vehicle for a “two-way conversation” between the author and the reader – in line with Adam Kelly’s notion of the postironic new sincerity. Textual analysis of the stories is supplemented by the results of a reader-response survey conducted among the students and staff of the Univer-

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Cutting to the chase : microfictions, empathy and the new sincerity

Paul Ricoeur declares that “being-entangled in stories” is an inherent property of the human condition. He introduces the notion of narrative identity—a form of identity constructed on the basis of a self-constructed life-narrative, which becomes a source of meaning and self-understanding. This article wishes to present chosen instances of life writing whose subjects resist yielding a life-story and reject the notions of narrative and identity. In line with Adam Phillips’s remarks regarding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), such works—which I refer to as fragmentary life writing—emerge out of a profound scepticism about any form of “fixing” oneself and confining the variety and randomness of experience to one of the available autobiographical plots.
The primary example of the genre is Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975)—an inventory of approximately 1,500 memories conveyed in the form of radically short passages beginning with the words “I remember.” Despite the qualified degree of unity provided by the fact that all the recollections come from the consciousness of a single person, the book does not arrange its content in any discernible order—chronological or thematic; instead, the reader is confronted with a life-in-fragments. Although individual passages could be part of a coming-of-age, a coming-out or a portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man narrative, Brainard is careful not to let any of them consolidate. An attempt at defining the characteristics of the proposed genre will be followed by an indication of more recent examples of fragmentary life writing and a reflection on its prospects for development

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Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Fragmentary Life Writing and the Resistance to Narrative and Identity

1.Introduction Among the six works shortlisted for the second edition of the Goldsmiths Prize --established in 2013 to "celebrate ... creative daring ... and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form--was The Absent Therapist (2014) by a relatively little-known English novelist, poet, and creative writing teacher Will Eaves. The book's radically fragmentary form--an amalgam of 150 disconnected voices--and its brevity (just over a hundred pages) puzzled many reviewers and left them uncertain if that work should be qualified as a novel in the first place. Critics have referred to it as an "anti-novel"? a "random catalogue of twenty first century scenarios, queries, complaints and observations" (Quick 2015), an "experimental novella" (Woodhead 2014), "a book for want of a more precise term" (Lezard 2014), something in between poetry and a novel (Sweetman 2014), and a "miniature but infinite novel" (Kennard). For the purpose of this analysis--in line with the recent tendency to loosen the generic criteria for what constitutes a novel, as a result of which such works as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2005) and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007) have been accepted in that accommodating category--Eaves's work is treated as an experimental novel. The aim of this article is to examine The Absent Therapist's innovative structure as well as to assert the book's polyphonic nature. The resistance of its constituent parts to fully cohere and yield a unified meaning will be considered as a characteristic feature of the subtype of experimental fiction called fragmentary writing. The Absent Therapist is divided into five chapters, each of which contains between twenty three and forty three unnumbered and untitled sections, whose length varies between a single line and two pages. The chapters, in turn, are both numbered and titled. All the titles--"The Absent Therapist", "Where Do You Get Your Tired Ears From?", "We Are Prey", "Radio Traffic", and "A Start in Life"-are passages or phrases which feature at some point in any given chapter. Each section takes the form of a monologue spoken by a different person. However, the kinds of speeches delivered by characters do not follow any pattern. Some of them read like self-contained "short short stories", others are completely incomprehensible--cryptic remarks deprived of any context or bits of overheard phone conversations. Certain sections appear to be addressed to a listening "you", whereas others resemble individual thoughts and philosophical meditations. "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification", reads the novel's epigraph from 1 Corinthians 14:10. The voices, indeed, do not seem to have much in common, in terms of social standing, education, profession, age, gender or ethnicity. The wide array of speakers includes such individuals as a literature student, a body-builder, a call-centre operator, a hat-knitter, a hotel supervisor, a police officer, a career-counsellor, an experimental psychologist, an actor, and a Jew-turned-Christian geologist. There are very few examples of individuals who could be grouped under a certain heading; the only ones that could are teachers and academics (most of them rather frustrated), loners, homosexuals, and civil rights activists. (1) The first edition's blurb classifies them, rather vaguely, as voices of "sons and lovers, wanderers, wonderers, stayers, leavers, readers and believers". Perhaps the only feature that all the speakers share is having English as their mother tongue; the vast majority of them seem to come from either Britain, the US or Australia. (2) 2. Heteroglossia The multiplicity and variety of voices contained in Eaves's novel makes it a fine example of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. In "Discourse in the Novel" (1982), Bakhtin coins this term and defines it as the novel's essential inclination to accommodate multiple and diverse languages and voices. …

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Heteroglossia and Fragmentariness in the Absent Therapist by Will Eaves

This article examines the interplay between realism and non-realism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and argues that some of its departures from realism could be interpreted as illustrative of the workings of memory. The article opens with an outlining of Ishiguro’s earlier novels’ curious suspension in the middle ground between endorsing and challenging realism and with a brief discussion of their preoccupation with the work of remembering. What follows is an analysis of some of the most significant non-realist themes and motifs in When We Were Orphans, including the adoption of a naive perspective of the first-person narrator, the relativity of time and space and the use of narrative coincidence. The delusion of the protagonist, his immersion in the past trauma as well as the ultimate disillusionment are shown as central to the construction of the novel’s key metaphor—that of an orphan. In conclusion, the novel’s problematisation of the workings of memory is discussed. Memory emerges from When We Were Orphans as an inherently unreliable mechanism prone to manipulation and fabulation and subject to the dictates of identity. Finally, the novel’s meticulously woven innovative blend of realism and surrealism, redolent of the bizarre realm of memory, is considered as a unique artistic achievement staking out new territory for literature.

Wojciech Drąg

Papers

"A galaxy of signifiers”: David Clark’s "88 Constellations" for Wittgenstein as a Paradigm of the Barthesian Writerly/Plural Text

Cutting to the chase : microfictions, empathy and the new sincerity

Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Fragmentary Life Writing and the Resistance to Narrative and Identity

Heteroglossia and Fragmentariness in the Absent Therapist by Will Eaves

Beyond the Confines of Realism: Seeking New Metaphors for Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans