Cultural Memory and the Communicational Criticism of Literature

Communicational criticism focuses on the ethics of literary address. It tends to show that writers who try to send some particular message may thereby allow their addressees relatively little scope for their own perceptions and evaluations. Other writers, by contrast, offer their audiences an opportunity to compare notes about life from within more than one life-world, so agreeing, as it were, to dis-agree when necessary. By engaging in this more “genuine” kind of literary communication, such writers can promote the post-postmodern goal of a globalization that is non-hegemonic, and not least through their handling of cultural memory. When they loosen up one-to-one correlations between particular ranges of memory and particular communities, cultural memory becomes a polyvalent resource for both personal hybridities and rainbow coalitions. In the present article, I illustrate this process from Anglophone literature, paying special attention to a number of postmodern novelists and an early modern poet.