Memory and place : a phenomenological study
Research on the relationship between place, memory, and identity has tended to focus on either 'felicitous' instances of domesticity (Bachelard, 1994), or on the unambiguous dualism between what constitutes a sense of place and what has perniciously been termed 'site', place divested of its specificity and reduced to a non-place (Casey, 1993, 1997, 2000). My thesis is a rejoinder to this dualism by redirecting the focus toward the memory of places that challenge rather than reinforce our sense of identity. In this way, I hope to advance a more nuanced and progressive understanding of the role place plays in shaping identity, a role that extends to transitional as well as domestic places. I achieve this by performing a phenomenological analysis on the ambiguous entwinement between place and memory, in both an everyday, transitional, and traumatic context. As I argue in my thesis, far from an additional component of memory and history, the spatiality of the past is not only central in the preservation of history but also fundamental to its emergence in the first instance. This implicit rejection of memory as being solely a temporal event leads me to a series of investigations aimed at assessing how memory can
Trigg, Dylan
Memory and place : a phenomenological study. Research on the relationship between place, memory, and identity has tended to focus on either 'felicitous' instances of domesticity (Bachelard, 1994), or on the unambiguous dualism between what constitutes a sense of place and what has perniciously been termed 'site', place divested of its specificity and reduced to a non-place (Casey, 1993, 1997, 2000). My thesis is a rejoinder to this dualism by redirecting the focus toward the memory of places that challenge rather than reinforce our sense of identity. In this way, I hope to advance a more nuanced and progressive understanding of the role place plays in shaping identity, a role that extends to transitional as well as domestic places. I achieve this by performing a phenomenological analysis on the ambiguous entwinement between place and memory, in both an everyday, transitional, and traumatic context. As I argue in my thesis, far from an additional component of memory and history, the spatiality of the past is not only central in the preservation of history but also fundamental to its emergence in the first instance. This implicit rejection of memory as being solely a temporal event leads me to a series of investigations aimed at assessing how memory can
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