Enacting Past and Present: The Memory Theaters of Djuna Barnes, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Marguerite Duras [Paperback]

This far-reaching study of women's literature sheds new light onto the ways we think about memory, modernism, postmodernism, feminism. InEnacting Past and Present, author Michaela M. Grobbel discusses novels by Djuna Barnes, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Marguerite Duras. According to the author, these works show us that fascinating shifts in memory texts have been taking place in the twentieth century, indicating the need for different approaches to understanding memory. Through a discussion of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and the work of contemporary scholars in feminism and cultural studies, Grobbel focuses on these texts as types of performance that lead to interesting forms of re-presenting memory. These theaters of memory foreground the present but also critically demonstrate the complex relationship of the present to the past. Grobbel offers her readers new ways to think about autobiography, performance, and the process of memory, enriching currrent scholarship on feminism and literary modernism.Michaela M. Grobbelteaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Sonoma State University in Northern California. She teaches German, world literature and theater, and interdisciplinary courses in the humanities. Grobbel studied at the University of Bonn in Germany, and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California in Los Angeles. Her research and academic publications focus on twentieth-century women's writing and feminist theory, cultural criticism, and ethnic minority literature, especially German-speaking Romany autobiography.

Michaela Grobbel's careful and insightful readings of modernist prose texts by Djuna Barnes (Nightwood1936), Ingeborg Bachmann (Malina1971), and Marguerite Duras (Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein1964) explore a 'new feminist art of memory,' that-in contrast to the classical rhetorical art of memory-is centered on the return of the (female) body within thel3&