Idiosyncratic memory: Self construction in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel

Memory is a social structure, lying at the root of culture that connects individual lives through language, history, literature and innumerable cultural texts, narratives, historical documents, and museums, monuments and even historical sites. It is language-based; being ever-evolving mental faculty, memory is continuous construction and reconstruction of mind and self. The social movement in constructionist psychology treats it as a narrative or as a story telling activity— a sort of fictionalization of perceptual experiences. Remembering is accordingly sensed as an act of creating/recreating memory by narrating it through a channel of language, which's meaning and construction vary from person to person, and according to circumstances of now self, environment or audiences whom it is told. For this thesis, a framework synthesizing various but interrelated concepts mostly from memory literature and several humanities on memory like philosophy, psychology and history provides critical perspective and theoretical background in the analysis of American author Thomas Wolfe's first autobiographical work Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (2006). The thesis also surveys contemporary and classic memory literature including American authors Pagan Kennedy (Confessions of a Memory Eater, 2013) and Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory, 1989) and British authors Tom McCarthy (Remainder, 2005) and Kazuo Ishiguro (The Buried Giant, 2015) and Check author Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1982). Each of those stories idiosyncratically tells memory through literary themes of remembrance, amnesia, identity search or existential crisis. In a sense, the thesis addresses how and in what ways literature may reflect philosophy, psychology and history that tackle memory scientifically. Likewise, studying the ways Wolfe modified and narrated his actual experiences in his literary work is linked with an understanding of the writer's world, which is as well related to social, cultural, historical political and also literary contexts in the production and the reproduction of Look Homeward Angel, and their examination in the scope of this study; however, "autobiography is itself a major source of concern because of its very instability in terms of the postulated opposites between self and world, literature and history, facts and fiction, subject and objects (Marcus 7). Self-other or subject-object dichotomies, which underlie the persistent dialectic in the criticism of autobiography as both literary and historical narrative, are revisited, criticized and developed in the analysis of the self representation in Look Homeward, Angel.