Mapping Memory: Myth, History, and Liminality in Harlem and the Bronx

<p>The relationship between notions of ‘history’ and ‘myth’ is a familiar dilemma within the field of historiography. As this thesis will seek to demonstrate, myth – defined here as evaluative representations of the past to suit demands of the present – is virtually indistinguishable from history, insofar as both are constructed from the same raw materials: subjective remembrances. Through an examination of mythical representations of physical places, this thesis will present a model to explain how myth is constructed, thereby emphasising the intimate and problematic relationship between the aforementioned categories. In short, myth making occurs when memories travel through liminal space from one individual to the next, with said liminal points allowing for degradation and transmutation. The further along one is in the chain, the more one is dependent on myth. Through electing to focus on two such locales that have been of particular interest to me – Harlem during the jazz age and The Bronx during the origins of hip hop – I was able to adopt an auto-ethnographic perspective, gaining insight into the extent to which my understanding was dependent on a series of compounding representations. Further, these areas also draw attention to how such representation can broaden or localise, depending on the myth and the purpose of its invocation. In different contexts and different historical narratives, different areas within New York City have been subjected to the same process, which can account for the pervasive idea of ‘New York’ that continues to circulate.</p>

Mapping Memory: Myth, History, and Liminality in Harlem and the Bronx

<p>The relationship between notions of ‘history’ and ‘myth’ is a familiar dilemma within the field of historiography. As this thesis will seek to demonstrate, myth – defined here as evaluative representations of the past to suit demands of the present – is virtually indistinguishable from history, insofar as both are constructed from the same raw materials: subjective remembrances. Through an examination of mythical representations of physical places, this thesis will present a model to explain how myth is constructed, thereby emphasising the intimate and problematic relationship between the aforementioned categories. In short, myth making occurs when memories travel through liminal space from one individual to the next, with said liminal points allowing for degradation and transmutation. The further along one is in the chain, the more one is dependent on myth. Through electing to focus on two such locales that have been of particular interest to me – Harlem during the jazz age and The Bronx during the origins of hip hop – I was able to adopt an auto-ethnographic perspective, gaining insight into the extent to which my understanding was dependent on a series of compounding representations. Further, these areas also draw attention to how such representation can broaden or localise, depending on the myth and the purpose of its invocation. In different contexts and different historical narratives, different areas within New York City have been subjected to the same process, which can account for the pervasive idea of ‘New York’ that continues to circulate.</p>

Public Sculpture and Social Practice in the Roman Empire

One of the more fruitful lines of research in recent decades has been the exploration of how Roman sculpture interacted with the lives of its contemporary viewers. This chapter employs monumental reliefs, large-scale sculptures set up in public areas by official authorities, as a case study to examine how sculpture contributed to social practice under the Roman emperors. Particular focus is given to the phenomenon of imperial portrait types, the blending of history and myth in sculpted narratives, issues of visibility, and the afterlife of some reliefs. The chapter also examines possible means of evaluating responses to relief monuments, from provincial imitations, to private copies in other media, to the written record. In the end, monumental reliefs prove an excellent means to highlight the general dissonance between ancient and modern perceptions of sculpture.

Double palimpsest: History and myth in the poetry of the Gallipoli campaign

The Ottoman defeat of the British and French imperial forces during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, known in Turkish as the Çanakkale Wars, had already shown how the theatres of war would extend beyond Europe. While much of the poetry in English that came from Gallipoli is well known in the Anglophone world, the Turkish poetry from Çanakkale is less well known outside Turkey itself. This article analyses selected Gallipoli poems written in both languages in order to show how they had similar recourse to overlapping narratives of history and myth in their efforts to place the experience of war within a wider transhistorical and transcultural framework. By reflecting on the different uses of this double palimpsest, it aims to show how a transnational and transcultural approach to memorial culture can develop our understanding of how the Great War was written.

Reclamation of the Narrative for the Silenced Voice in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

This article analyzes Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, a rewriting of Homeric epic, The Odyssey. Atwood rewrites the story — the saga of gallantry and triumphalism of Odysseus, with narrative shift that brings postmodern irony and parody, self-reflexivity and metafiction, and intertextuality and paratextuality into play. The article tries explore if Atwood’s shifting of narrative orientation of the Homeric epic yields any different and substantial reception and interpretation of the epic in the recent context.Moreover, I demonstrate how Atwood’s reconstruction and subsequently the empowerment of the minor characters unfolds the incompatibilities and discrepancies the official version of Homer’s epic, and brings the marginal voice to the front by granting a variety of narrative access.I argue, giving subject positions to silent agents and using various genres of expression, for instance, history and myth, Atwood, through the deployment of an autodiegetic narrative, brings together gender, genre and language in such a way that results in a decisive shift in conceptualizing the narrative structure for the marginal voice and agency female characters. The article concludes that why rereading of classical and canonical text is crucial to bring the marginals’ claim to a subject position, and produce a different language and literature that allows space for expression subjectivity of characters on the margins

Fairy Tale Epic

Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo is the focus of this chapter. Hailed as its author’s most comprehensive effort at historic panorama, epic in scale, Nostromo also (if somewhat surreptitiously) engages the diminutive form of fairy tale. Combining epic with fairy tale provides the perplexing indeterminacy many readers detect, which is often attributed to Conrad’s literary impressionism. What he reveals, however, is that even the supposedly factual enterprise of history is subject to the vicissitudes commonly accorded “creative” (thus fictive) literary forms like epic, lyric, and fairy tale. History and myth emerge from Nostromo as helpless collaborators in the hybrid fabrications of modern fiction.

History in the Ylias and Alexandreis

This chapter argues that the Alexandreis and Ylias reflect the way that Virgil was believed, in the twelfth century, to have constructed history and myth in the Aeneid. The key witnesses to the twelfth-century perception of history in the Aeneid are the “Anselm” commentary on the Aeneid and Servius, which was ubiquitous in the period and determined the shape of most other available commentaries on the Aeneid. Servius’s understanding of history (historia) and myth (fabula), and especially anachronism, is discussed in detail. Servius reads the Aeneid as a historical text which, although often bending the historical truth, did so with intentional allusion to specific historical events or alternate historical possibilities. The Alexandreis’s and the Ylias’s special interest in historical truth (historia) accords well with the way in which the Aeneid was read in the twelfth century.

Fragility and Resilience: Church History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century Ethiopia

The growth of a myth of ancient origins pertaining to the church and monastery of Märṭulä Maryam and the exploration of its content and context form the central focus of this study. Material related to the church’s apparent ancient origin provides appropriate data through which to illustrate at once the themes of historical fragility and resilience. Märṭulä Maryam consolidated its mythical history by suppressing the memory of its actual founder, thus altering the tradition of the church itself. This study will demonstrate that efforts to completely erase the memory of Märṭulä Maryam’s founder and its original history were wholly in vain. Such acts of suppression inevitably leave indelible traces of the true past, not to mention the fact that its actual history is well secured within the records of other Ethiopian churches, as well as in those of Märṭulä Maryam itself.