“It isn’t their language in which I speak their stories”: Language, memory, and “unforgetting” in Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Budapest diary: In search of the Motherbook and Anca Vlasopolos’s no return address: A memoir of displacement
Document Type
Article
Source of Publication
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Publication Date
1-1-2016
Abstract
© 2016 The Autobiography Society. In this article, the author looks at two representative post-communist autobiographical narratives, Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996) and Anca Vlasopolos’s No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (2000). The author considers the linguistic aspects of accessing a traumatic past and the possibility of successful returns, via another language (English), to the site of memory. The author posits that the narratives aim at restorative gestures of reconstructing the national past along the lines of minority presences and discourses in Hungary and Romania, respectively. Their contributions to the larger post-communist memory work in these two countries become significant through the mediation, from outside the national borders, of alternative memories that challenge a finite, conclusive narrative of the history of communisms in East-Central Europe. By employing English for the articulation of their particular truths, they highlight the new functionality of English as a current lingua franca in a geopolitical space marked by its historical absence.
DOI Link
ISSN
Publisher
Routledge
Volume
31
Issue
2
First Page
309
Last Page
332
Disciplines
Psychology | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Scopus ID
Recommended Citation
Haragos, Szidonia H., "“It isn’t their language in which I speak their stories”: Language, memory, and “unforgetting” in Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Budapest diary: In search of the Motherbook and Anca Vlasopolos’s no return address: A memoir of displacement" (2016). All Works. 26.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/works/26
Indexed in Scopus
yes
Open Access
no