On History and Memory in Arab Literature and Western Poetics

Texts act like receptacles for an ever-present remembered past, or what the French philosopher Paul Ricœur 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 Ricœur'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.