Preface

This book is about the inscription of memory within human bodies, and about the many ways in which memories are incorporated in institutions, histories and traditions. The inner dialectic of the book is that between what lived bodies undergo, retain and express pre-linguistically and the explicitly verbal language that acts to conceptualise and specify what is happening in bodily experience. The book argues that the semiosis that occurs at the bodily level has its own articulateness, history and purposes.

The arrangement of the book is organised in two broad clusters: a first, Chapters 1–3, is concerned with the relationship between narrative and cultural memory; while a second, Chapters 4–7, treats the relationship between the body and cultural memory.