How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories–how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought.
“[Memoirs] leave out the person to whom thing happened, The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being So they say ‘this is what happened’ but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened.”
Virginia Woolf, “Sketch of the Past”
Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of Artful Truths (2021), How to be Multiple (2023) and before that a series of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What’s Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case” and “Narrative and Meaning in Life”. (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public). She has recently begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art.
John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting–and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro.
Discussed in this episode:
“A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf
“Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir,” Sue William Silverman
The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk
My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard
How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti
An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo
Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch
Recall This Book 