Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s and lost memories.
“Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties and embedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.”
Literature and Memory: Public lecture series on life-writing, autobiography, personal narrative (UCT Summer & Winter School: January & August 2020).
Artwork above by Robin Rhode.
Block, Stefan Merrill. ‘A Place Beyond Words: The Literature of Alzheimer’s’. The New Yorker. 20 August 2014.
Dowling, Finuala. Notes from the Dementia Ward. 2008.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘Memory’ from Natural History of the Intellect. 1871.
Franzen, Jonathan. ‘My Father’s Brain.’ In How to Be Alone: Essays. 2001.
MacFarquhar, Larissa. ‘The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care’. The New Yorker. 1 October, 2018. Video.
Maginess, Tess ed. Dementia and Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. 2018.
Shenk. David. The Forgetting: Portrait of an Epidemic. 2001. (Originally published as Understanding Alzheimer’s: the Biography of a Disease).