Texts act like receptacles for an ever-present remembered past, or what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls "the present representation of an absent thing". They might embody an efficient remedy to forgetting but could also become a vivid testimony for exorcised traumas. This volume focuses on Ricoeur's phenomenology of memory, epistemology of history, and hermeneutics of forgetting. A special emphasis is laid on the dissension between individual and collective institutional memory.

Natives, Aborigines, Indigenous populations, and First Nations are all appellations that assert the legitimacy of various antecessors despite the subordinate position granted to them by colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial theories. In a perpetual quest for agency, the native has been framed within a set of representational practices that claim for a redress of grievances.Cultural, mediatized and historical representations of the native tend to fall within the boundaries of either a bottom-up or a top-down view that fits within a structuralist paradigm that rarely questions the individual,...

Pain and pleasure are at the heart of human experiences and literary journeys. This book takes the title of Roland Barthes's text on the pleasure of writing as a starting point for the discussion of other different wor(l)ds and cartographies of pain and pleasure. Set against the Aristotelian delineation of pleasure as the major principle that should govern a literary endeavor, this volume investigates alternative reflections on the themes of pleasure and pain. Thinking about the ways through which expressions of pain and pleasure may affect the writer and the reader as experiences of other...

The present state of research in precarity demands meta-questions and hence we need to probe both philosophy and practice in light of precarity's different manifestations. The plural perspectives by which this phenomenon can be addressed also suggest potential for further theorization alongside that of Butler and her critics. By inviting scholars and experts from different fields and disciplines, and by applying multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of our precarious world, while providing insights into the...