Original scientific paper
History and memory in Nancy Huston's Fault Lines
Mirna Sindičić Sabljo
; University of Zadar
Abstract
Fault Lines, a novel by Nancy Huston, narrates a story about four generations of a family. The narrator of the first part of the novel is Sol, of the second his father Randall, of the third his grandmother Sadie, and of the last his great-grandmother Christine, all of them at the age of six. The action of the first part of the novel takes place in California in 2004, of the second in Israel in 1982, of the third in Toronto and New York in 1962 and of the last in Germany in 1944–45. On the backdrop of the family story, the novel tells about the complex historical events that marked the second half of the 20th century, among which the key place belongs to the Second World War and the Nazi program Lebensborn. Fault Lines is a novel about memory and a (new)historical novel that narrates historical events through the prism of personal and family history. The article analyses the novel Fault Lines within the theoretical framework of literary memory studies, with emphasis on the representation of history in the novel, the relation of memory and history, the intergenerational transmission of memory of traumatic events, and the connection of memory and the formation of individual and collective identities.
Keywords
Lebensborn; Nancy Huston; Memory; Postmemory; History; Fault Lines
Hrčak ID:
228949
URI
Publication date:
26.11.2019.
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