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179.More information
Up to the early nineteenth century, an individual could reasonably assume that his sole mind, and thus his memory, contained all the knowledge needed to understand the world he lived in; Milan Kundera saw Goethe as the emblem of this possibility. The multiplication of information and technology begun in the mid-nineteenth century ended this possibility and gave birth to what the critic Richard Terdiman has termed the “memory crisis”, that is, the destabilizing experience of a memory experienced as partial and truncated. A parallel can be established between this crisis and the development of the novel in the nineteenth century: the recollection, imperfect by definition, one has of reading a novel overlaps with the memory, equally imperfect, one then starts to have of human knowledge. Based on this hypothesis, we highlight three key moments of this convergence to show how reading fiction accompanies our relation to memory: the Balzacian moment (resistance to forgetting), the turn of the twentieth century (acceptance of forgetting) and the contemporary period (distancing of memory).
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