Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
Description
British and American literature has seen an extraordinary number of rewritings of Greek myth in the last decade, from Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles over Pat Barker’s Troy novels to Natalie Haynes’s narrative non-fiction Pandora’s Jar. These critically acclaimed and commercially successful books are lauded as feminist mnemonic interventions that give a “powerful voice” to the silenced women of Ancient Greece (Seymour 2021).
However, it is the contention of this paper that these counter-memories are unproductive mnemonic interventions. Consistently casting women as passive victims and men as active perpetrators, they corroborate rather than undermine dominating patriarchal mnemonic structures in the UK and the US, making use of the past in such a way that “history only makes sense because it offers familiarity in a familiar form” (Davies 2006, p. 31).
Period
13 Oct 2022
Event title
MSA Nordic Annual Conference: Explorations of Counter-Memories