Memory has always been crucial to French literature and culture as a means of mediating the
relationship between perception and knowledge of the individual coming to terms with his
identity in time. Relatively recently memory has also emerged as the key force in the creation
of a collective consciousness in the wider perspective of French cultural history. This
collection of essays selected from the proceedings of a seminar on 'Memory' given by Dr Emma
Wilson at the University of Cambridge offers a fresh evaluation of memory as both a cultural
and an individual phenomenon in modern and contemporary French culture including literature
cinema and the visual arts. 'Anamnesia' the book's title develops the Aristotelian concept of
anamnesis: recollection as a dynamic and creative process which includes forgetting as much as
remembering concealment as much as imagination. Memory in this extremely diverse range of
essays is therefore far from being presented as a straightforward process of recalling the past
but emerges as the site of research and renegotiation of contradictions and even aporia.
