VINTAGE WINE, VINTAGE MEMORIES: OVERTONES OF PROUST’S MADELEINE REVISITED IN JOANNE HARRIS’S BLACKBERRY WINE
To prove discontinuity – as the postmodern pundits do claim this is substantiated - in terms of tradition and canon/ized is moot as there are pervasive influences from one period to another, indeed there is ideological clout identifyable in subsequent texts starting with modernity. Modernity as ideological hub for all things literary is almost a commonplace: issues ranging from Angst to fragmentariness (as triggered by the instantaneous dismembering of the body in World War One as a result of the invention of the grenade in warfare, a novel techne of violence), from modern neurosis to nostalgia for times of yore, say, for the irretrievable, pre-lapsarian, Edenite childhood/youth, when the living was easy. As this research aims to show, nostalgia (in the Proustian vein) is not an overrated mechanism of memory in the postmodern age.
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