Cultural Memory

Donald R. Wehrs is Hargis Professor of English Literature at Auburn University, Auburn, AL, as well as editor or co-editor of four collections, including The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism (2017), and author of three monographs on African fiction. He has also published on comparative literature, Shakespeare, and literary theory. Suzanne Nalbantian is Professor of Comparative Literature at Long Island University and an interdisciplinary scholar. Her eight books include Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (2003), and her edited volumes The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (2011) and Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts and Our Minds Reveal (2019). Don M. Tucker is CEO and senior scientist at The Brain Electrophysiology Laboratory Company, and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon. He has published Mind From Body: Experience from Neural Structure (2007), Cognition and Neural Development (2012, with Phan Luu), and Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing (2021, with Mark Johnson).

Introduction: Cultural Memory from Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Donald R. Wehrs

Part 1: The Neuroscience of Cultural Memory

1. Synaptic Epigenesis and the Social Brain

Suzanne Nalbantian and Jean-Pierre Changeux

2. Molecular Epigenetics, the Biology of Memory, and Biology as Memory

Maurizio Meloni

3. Molecular Mechanisms of Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Implications for Cultural Memory

Peter Sarkies

4. From Self-Continuity to Culture and Back: The Brain’s Scale-Free Activity and Temporal Memory of the World

Georg Northoff

5. The Evolution and Dissolution of Cultural Memory

Don M. Tucker and Phan Luu

Part 2: Cultural Memory in Psychological and Social Contexts

6. Collective Memory: Conceptual Foundations and Group Formation

James V. Wertsch, Henry L. Roediger III, and Christopher L. Zerr

7. Cultural Memory: Sharing Recollections We Don’t Have About Things That Never Happened

Patrick Colm Hogan

8. The Aesthetics of Culture: Framing Shared Experiences Through Embodied Metaphors

Andrea Carraro, Angelie Ignacio, Eva L. Cupchik, and Gerald C. Cupchik

9. The U.S. Civil War and Cultural Memory

David S. Reynolds

Part 3: The Arts, Literature, and Contested Cultural Memory

10. The Memorial’s Vernacular Arc Between Berlin’s Denkmal and New York City’s 9/11 Memorial

James E. Young

11. Nourishment for the Mind: Narrating Indian Food as Cultural Memory

Alexa Weik von Mossner

12. Neural Pluralism and Cultural Memory in Eliot’s The Waste Land and Akhmatova’s Requiem

Donald R. Wehrs

13. From Implicit Memory to Cultural Counter-Memory: Marguerite Duras Rewriting Colonial Trauma

Sirkka Knuuttila