A Comparative Study Of Memory Reconstruction In Germany Family Novels Crab Walking And Maybe Esther

Since the 1980 s,"memory research" has become a central reasearch object in Germany and it spreaded to even the entire Western academic circle.As a field of western humanities in the 20 st century,the study of cultural memory in the field of humanities has gone through nearly a hundred years from its inception to its prosperity.In the 1920 s,French social psychologist Maurice Halbwachs created the theory of "collective memory" by liberating memory research from a completely physiological perspective.In the 1980 s,the German couple Jan Assmann & Aleida Assmann defined and detailed the concept of "cultural memory" under the framework of cultural studies and historical anthropology.A literary researcher Astried Erll pioneered recently an interdisciplinary experiment in literature and memory research.This dissertation selects two representative fictions of German contemporary family literature as the analysis object.Crab Walking is a representative work of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass,who looked back at the German history after the World War II at the beginning of 21 st century.Maybe Esther is a collection of family stories,in which Ukrainian immigrant writer Katja Petrowskaja observes history and memory from an unique perspective of a minority group member.Both of this two fictions inherited the writing tradition of "family writing" or rather "generational writing" in German literature,at the same time,they possess brand-new characteristics from their time backgrounds.As memory writing,their content and writing clues are both intergenerational memory inheritance inside a family.Through the reconstruction and imaginative supplement of personal memory,a broad and complicated era background and ethnic identity can be fully presented.The method of this research is to conduct a comprehensive comparative study of narrative strategies and narrative techniques of the two target texts.The two family fictions at the beginning of the 21 st century contain collective memory,stored memory,functional memory,personal memory and cultural memory.On the textual level,this study mainly bases on Génette’s classical narratology and the therefrom developed post-classical narratology theory.We made a comprehensive analysis of the text’s multi-level narrative,narrative perspective conversion and narrative time interleaving.Finally,this study discovered how contemporary German family fiction consciously uses a variety of narrative skills to reconstruct and revive family memories and thus achieves the purpose of preserving and disseminating cultural memory.