By Chloe Jane Mansola
Author Biography:
Chloe Jane Mansola was born and grew up in Greece. She just finished her fourth year of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has mainly studied Victorian and Early Modern literature in her honours years, but branched out this semester into spy fiction and the American novel which has introduced her to a few new favourites, specifically The Catcher in the Rye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Heat of the Day. Her to-read pile includes Ariadne by Jennifer Saint and Stoner by John Williams.
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This essay focuses on the relationship between personal and cultural-historical memory in James Baldwin’s collection of essays Notes of a Native Son and Toni Morrison’s essay The Site of Memory. Baldwin’s writing blurs the boundary between cultural-historical and personal memory by using culture to reflect himself personally, by criticising the sacrifice of personal for cultural in fiction, and by consistently utilising history to decipher people, whereas Morrison transfers and translates personal memory into historical memory. In Notes of a Native Son cultural historical memory implies and reflects the personal whereas in The Site of Memory personal memory is transformed into cultural historical memory to elucidate the whole of a person.
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