Shelf Lives: Nonhuman Agency and Seamus Heaney’s Vibrant Memory Objects

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Notes

1 Barad, “Interview,” 59.

2 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 8.

3 For a critique of utilitarian understandings of things, see Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Hodder, Entangled; Harman, Tool-Being; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Brown, Sense of Things.

4 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9.

5 Munteán, Plate and Smelik, Materializing Memory, 1–3.

6 Hodder, Entangled, 2–5.

7 Halbwachs, Morphologie, 13.

8 Nora, Realms of Memory, 13–14.

9 For a comprehensive account of the theories of Nora and Halbwachs, see Erll, Memory in Culture, 15–33.

10 Assmann, Cultural Memory, 6.

11 Ibid.

12 Similarly to Nora and Halbwachs’s theories, Assmann’s object memory operates through a fairly human-centric perspective despite its more dynamic construction by being primarily aimed at understanding ‘the societal construction of normative and formative versions of the past’ [emphasis added]. Ann Rigney has also pointed out Assmann’s account requires a more dynamic conception of ‘stabilization’ (“Plenitude,” 15).

13 See Rigney and Erll, Mediation, Remediation.

14 Hirsch and Spitzer, Generation, 2–4; “Testimonial Objects,” 256.

15 A cookbook put together by a group of women in the Terezín concentration camp and a miniature collective artists’ book depicting camp life put together by artist inmates in the Romanian work camp at Vapniarka. The cookbook was intended as an inheritance for the daughter of one of the inmates, and the artist’s book was a gift to the inmate who acted as camp doctor. See Hirsch and Spitzer, “Testimonial Objects.”

16 Sturken, “Tourists,” 28.

17 Ibid., 18.

18 For a comprehensive explanation of the ontological turn see Holbraad and Pedersen, “Introduction,” 1–30.

19 Rigney, “Things and the Archive,” 14.

20 Ibid.

21 Brunow, Remediating, 40.

22 For an account of ‘vibrant materiality’ see Bennett, Vibrant Matter; see also van der Tuin and Dolphijn, New Materialism for an explanation of DeLanda’s ethics of neo-materialist entanglement.

23 Calls for examining the materiality of the medium in memory studies can be found in Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and Reading, Save As; Reading and Notley, ‘Globital’; Crownshaw, Kilby and Rowland, Future of Memory; Munteán, Plate and Smelik, Materializing Memory; for a media-studies oriented critique of Erll’s remediation see Brunow, Remediating, 47–49.

24 See Reading and Notley, “Globital,” Munteán, Plate and Smelik, Materializing Memory, and Van Dijck, Connectivity for discussions of connectivity and memory; see Rinehard and Ippolito, Re-collections, and Kidd, Museums for discussions of memory curation in a digitalized world. For a discussion of archives and cultural memory see Dagmar Brunow, Remediating, 34–41.

25 Munteán, Plate and Smelik, Materializing Memory.

26 Parikka, Media Archaeology.

27 For an account of ‘geologies of media’ see Parikka, Geologies and for ‘medianatures’ see “New Materialism,” 96.

28 Parikka, Media Archaeology, 82–86.

29 Weizman and Keenan, Mengele’s Skull, 21.

30 Ibid., 13.

31 ‘Being is threaded through with mattering. Epistemology, ontology and ethics are inseparable. Matter of fact, matters of concern, and matters of care are shot through with one another’, Barad, “Interview,” 70. For definitions of ‘agential realism’ see Barad, Meeting, 26, 32; and especially 132–88.

32 ‘[D]iffraction does not fix what is the object and what is the subject in advance, and, so, unlike methods of reading one text or set of ideas against another where one set serves as a fixed frame of reference, diffraction involves reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge’, Barad, Meeting, 30; see especially chapter 2 (71–96) for an explanation of ‘diffractive methodology’. For a definition of intra-activity see 33; 97–131.

33 Barad, “Interview,” 55.

34 Ibid., 59.

35 Khan, “Agency,” 92.

36 Barad, Meeting, 26.

37 Barad, “Interview,” 67.

38 Ibid.

39 Hodder, Entangled, 10.

40 Ibid., 14.

41 Ibid., 88–91.

42 Sturken, “Tourists,” 28.

43 Kay, In Gratitude, 100.

44 Parker, Heaney, 178–81.

45 The more visibly confrontational poems occur mostly in the second part of the volume, the 12-part epic “Station Island” where the lyrical I undertakes a Dantean pilgrimage through an Irish underworld on Station Island where he meets spectres of writers and other familiars who question his commitment to writing ethically under the Troubles.

46 Brooker, “Remember Everything,” 156; Tobin, Passage to the Center, 203.

47 Examples of this are the ‘bog poems’ in North and Wintering Out, “Oysters” in Field Work etc.; for a brief account of the nonhuman in Heaney’s earlier work see Tobin, Passage.

48 Zerubavel qtd. in Fischer, Memory Work, 30.

49 Heaney, Station Island, 21.

50 All subsequent quotes in this section are from ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ in Heaney, Station Island, 20.

51 Ibid.

52 ‘Gourd’ appears repeatedly in the bog poems of previous volumes to describe the shrivelled head of Danish and German neolithic corpses preserved in peat bog see “The Tollund Man,” “Punishment,” “Strange Fruit” and “The Grauballe Man” in Heaney’s volumes Wintering Out and North.

53 Heaney, Station Island, 20.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Guy de Montfort was an English nobleman who had killed his cousin King Henry de Alamain during mass in the Viterbo cathedral in revenge for the murder of his kin; see McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry, 81, for an explanation of the Dantean allusion.

57 Heaney, Station Island, 20.

58 Hodder, Entangled, 111.

59 Heaney, Station Island, 20.

60 Ibid.

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Notes on contributors

Maria Zirra

Maria Zirra is currently pursuing a joint PhD degree from Stockholm University and Ghent University. Her dissertation investigates the materialites of visual memory in contemporary anglophone poetry. E-mail: [email protected]