Call for Articles
Slow Memory: The Transformative Promptings of Literature in Post-conflict Societies
for a special issue of Memory Studies Review (2026)
edited by Patrick Crowley and Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir
‘I feel something quiver in me, shift, try to rise, something that seems to have been unanchored at a great depth; I do not know what it is, but it comes up slowly; I feel the resistance and I hear the murmur of the distances traversed.’ (Proust, The Way by Swann’s, trans. By Lydia Davis (2002))
In À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Proust’s narrator forensically describes the key moment of anamnesis that brings the past of his childhood fully into the light of memory. Much of that past lay within a darkness beyond voluntary memory but the taste of the madeleine cake soaked in tea triggers a slow vibration, an unmooring of images that slowly rise into consciousness. Images lost reappear. The house in Combray recovers its full form and the experience, for the narrator, results in a powerful, existential affect. This celebrated passage is an exemplary description of involuntary memory, of a reunion between a subject and their past and of writing’s slow probing of that essential trait of being: memory. It is this scene that prompts us to ask how literature serves to absorb, to work through, to transform the past in ways that are deeply meaningful. It can contest official narratives, it can counter reductive narratives, it can instantiate a fiction that captures the truth of memory. Literature resists time, re-fashions it, deflects it in a ‘recovery’ of memory. Literature, in so many ways, is resistance.
Where Ann Rigney ‘highlighted the role of the creative arts, and particularly the role of aesthetic form in helping to remake memory within changing social frameworks’ (Rigney: 2021, 19), this special issue asks contributors to pursue literature’s specificity as an aesthetic form that works on the memory of conflict whether in the Balkans or South Sudan, Colombia or Gaza. We invite proposals that consider narrative form’s engagement with, and construction of, memory.
- How is the work of memory described in relation to the event?
- How does literature slow and distill the memory of an event?
We welcome proposals that attend to narratological craftings, to the patterns of detail, to reflections on literature’s role in societies that are in that fraught, fragile, uncertain moment of transitioning away from violence, negotiating constantly that slow dynamic of memory and forgetting.
Please send abstracts of 400-500 words along with a short biographical note to the editors by 1 September 2024 to gunnth@hi.is and patrick.crowley@universityofgalway.ie. Submission of full articles of 6000-8000 words by 1 February 2025.
Photo credits: Wikimedia commons
