![]() A cluster of recent, high-profile fiction and nonfiction amnesia narratives join a rapidly evolving tradition of neuronovels and brain memoirs, drawing on neuroscience to explore philosophical and social questions about the brain, identity, social relations, and history (Tougaw 5).ģ Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2013), winner of the 2015 St. In that sense, amnesia fictions may be the most abundant precursors to the contemporary neuronovel. It’s a tradition with a long history, including William Shakespeare, Wilkie Collins, Daphne DuMaurier, Octavia Butler, and Jonathan Lethem himself. His collection includes amnesia fictions by twentieth-century writers: Shirley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Kavan, Edmund White, and Haruki Murakami. In literature, film, and television, amnesia has a reputation as a cheap plot device that exaggerates and sensationalizes severe memory loss, often portraying forms of global transient amnesia, whereby a person loses all memory, but only temporarily.Ģ Lethem’s anthology demonstrates that amnesia is just as often a vehicle for literary innovation, philosophical exploration, psychological insight, and social critique. Lethem is differentiating outlandish or comical forms of literary amnesia, various forms of memory loss associated with a condition like Alzheimer’s or certain brain injuries-particularly retrograde amnesia, whereby a person loses memories already formed, and anterograde amnesia, whereby a person loses the ability to make new memories. In books and movies, though, versions of amnesia lurk everywhere” (xiii). It’s a rare condition, and usually a brief one. 1 As Jonathan Lethem observes in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Amnesia, “Real, diagnosable amnesia-people getting knocked on the head and forgetting their names-is mostly just a rumor in the world. ![]()
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