Fronteras como zonas de contacto: violencia, memoria y olvido en dos novelas de Graham Swift

Authors

  • Cristina Andrea Featherston Haugh Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Keywords:

memory, forgetfulness, violence, trauma, war

Abstract

In Waterland (1983) the narrator, Crick, a History professor does not hesitate to state that "the teaching of history is the teaching of mistakes” (235) and, throughout the tale, he establishes the ambiguous and cross border between the state of being (water) which turns into another (land). Waterland is a text fascinated by boundaries, elevations, borders, barriers, beginnings and ends. (Daniel Lea 73) In the novel published by Swift in 2011 (Wish You Were Here) the same idea of border as a contact zone between hatred and love, life and death, peace and violence, memory and forgetfulness appears again. It is a region in which lives transfigured by domestic and state violence converge, meet, become separated and try to reach a place where the opposites (memory/ forgetfulness, violence/ non-violence) can come into dialogue and arrive at borderland regions, at the “waterland” which is the only space, even if it is precarious, of salvation when faced to the sinking that surrounds the characters.

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References

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Schaffrath, Stephen. “The Many Facets of Chaos Versus Order Dichotomy in Graham Swift’s Waterland”. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 4/2 (Spring 2003): 84-93.

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Swift, Graham. Ojalá estuvieras aquí. 2011. Barcelona: Galaxia Guttenberg, 2014.

Sears, Rebecca. “Postcards Project: Wish you Were Here. Art on Paper 14/1 (2009):12-14.

Tomas Saraceno, On the Roof: Cloud City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012. Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno

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Published

2021-11-30

How to Cite

Featherston Haugh, C. A. . (2021). Fronteras como zonas de contacto: violencia, memoria y olvido en dos novelas de Graham Swift. Revista De Culturas Y Literaturas Comparadas, (11). Retrieved from https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/CultyLit/article/view/35748

Issue

No. 11 (2021): Número especial: Cruzando fronteras

Section

Comunicaciones

License

Creative Commons License

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