Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 41 No. 1, 2015.
Original scientific paper
READERS’ MEMORY IN EVERYDAY LIFE AND (FIRST WORLD) WAR
Lovro Škopljanac
; Faculty of philosophy in Zagreb
Abstract
Within the proposed topic, the first order of business will be to look into the general presence of wars in literature through the social memory of a group of contemporary Croatian readers, with special attention given to World War I. The analyzed material is made up of 90 non-professional readers’ recollections, which were collected during 2010 and 2011 as a part of the PhD dissertation called »Analysis of Recollection of Literary Works by Empirical Readers«. All references to war literature are isolated within the interviews, and especially those which refer to texts about World War I in order to create an indicator of the presence of these events in reader’s social memory. The topic of (First World) War within readers’ memory will thus be seen not just as a corpus of texts, but also as a reflection of the perceived tendency of readers to remember well (at least in prose fiction) characters and events which take place in the framework of unusual and extraordinary situations, which is on the other hand very close to the state of war that World War I had very clearly marked off from peaceful everyday life.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
138986
URI
Publication date:
30.4.2015.
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