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The impetus for this book is the belief that a comprehensive description of autobiographical memory in both form and function must be an eclectic, interdisciplinary endeavour. Unlike cognitive and experimental psychologists, who have conducted most of their work in laboratories and have been ...

The impetus for this book is the belief that a comprehensive description of autobiographical memory in both form and function must be an eclectic, interdisciplinary endeavour. Unlike cognitive and experimental psychologists, who have conducted most of their work in laboratories and have been concerned with rote memory tasks, Ross looks at motivation and emotion as components of human memory and assembles a diverse body of sources that have heretofore been ignored by psychologists in their study of memory. He organizes his discussions along three lines of inquiry: (1) the subjective or experimental dimension of autobiographical memory, (2) the early development and later recall of childhood memories, and (3) social, historical, and folkloric perspectives on autobiographical retention. Rich and original scope, this work calls on the names of James, Titchener, Freud, Piaget, Baldwin, Janet, Proust, Sartre, Bergson, Russell, Strauss, and Merleau-Ponty, among others, to broaden our current understanding of the experience of autobiographical memory.

Galya Diment draws a novel comparison between two giants of modernism and a relatively obscure nineteenth-century Russian realist, claiming that the three writers all reinvented the idea of duality in literature. Focusing on Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Joyce's Ulysses, and Goncharov's A Common Story ...

Galya Diment draws a novel comparison between two giants of modernism and a relatively obscure nineteenth-century Russian realist, claiming that the three writers all reinvented the idea of duality in literature. Focusing on Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Joyce's Ulysses, and Goncharov's A Common Story, she introduces and refines the idea of "co-consciousness" as the mechanism that allows each work to transcend the genre of the autobiographical bildungsroman and the classical tradition of duality, represented by the doppelganger. Defining co-consciousness as the means by which writers fictionalize what appear to be equally conscious sides of their personalities, she argues that this concept is the telling distinction between these three "divided-they-stand" writers and the "divided-they-fall" approach of other celebrated masters of the double. A crucial feature of the three writers is their tendency to tolerate the split personality as an inevitable yet not life-threatening condition. Diment presentsstrong evidence that the fictional split self often functions not only as an expression of a writer's inner conflicts but also as a powerful and conscious artistic tool. For Woolf, Joyce, and Goncharov, she writes, the fictional alter ego appears to act as a critical buffer between the writers themselves and their autobiographical material. The author discusses at some length the extent to which the concept of "simultaneous consciousness" is psychologically valid, and she pays considerable attention to the dual nature of the periods that formed each writer's sensibilities. She ends the main part of the book with Ulysses, she says, because she believes that in this novel "the co-conscious splitautobiographical self has found its perfect home".

It is a truism in psychology that self and autobiographical memory are linked, yet we still know surprisingly little about the nature of this relation. Scholars from multiple disciplines, including cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, anthropology and philosophy have begun theorizing and ...

It is a truism in psychology that self and autobiographical memory are linked, yet we still know surprisingly little about the nature of this relation. Scholars from multiple disciplines, including cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, anthropology and philosophy have begun theorizing and writing about the ways in which autobiographical memory is organized, the role that narratives play in the development of autobiographical memory, and the relations between autobiographical memory, narrative, and self concept. If narratives are a critical link between memory and self, then it becomes apparent that the roles of language and social interaction are paramount. These are the issues addressed in this volume. Although individual authors offer their own unique perspectives in illuminating the nature of the link between self and memory, the contributors share a perspective that both memory and self are constructed through specific forms of social interactions and/or cultural frameworks that lead to the formation of an autobiographical narrative. Taken together, the chapters weave a coherent story about how each of us creates a life narrative embedded in social-cultural frameworks that define what is appropriate to remember, how to remember it, and what it means to be a self with an autobiographical past.