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Counter-Memory and Phantasma

  • Renate Lachmann
Published/Copyright: February 20, 2008
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arcadia
From the journal Volume 39 Issue 2

Abstract

Contingency with all its connotations plays a major role in the literature of the fantastic. The latter takes refuge in three modes of encapsulating contingency into speech: 1. by placing it into the framework of the paradox of speaking about the unsayable, 2. by empowering its phantasms to reinvoke a past which was repressed by the constraints of official culture, 3. and, conversely, to efface historical traces of the given culture, official or non, by constructing an ‘unprecedented culture’, a cultural a-topia. These different approaches to contingency – transcendent, mnemonic, and anti-mnemonic – either foster divergent sets of argumentation within the fantastic text, and/or are implemented by textual strategies.

Published Online: 2008-02-20
Published in Print: 2004-11-19

© Walter de Gruyter

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