In this hybrid essay, I focus my experience of memory – the shifting shadow of my consciousness as a ghostly register – the way my mind is drawn to explore sideshadows and backalleys, in remembering and in writing. I reflect upon narrative realism as a form of writing that enacts theories of nostalgic longing through a plural narratorial presence and purpose, thereby replicating what it feels like to move through the world. Within the broader architecture of an entanglement with the Woolfian Vision (The Moment and Other Essays; Granite and Rainbow), I take an interest in various theories of memory and consciousness, including those outlined in Charles Fernyhough's Pieces of Light – How the New Science of MEMORY illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts, Oliver Sacks The River of Consciousness, and Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, together with deft, interrogative, ruminations upon the operational forces of nostalgia, in Jing McIntosh L & Aranjuez A (eds) Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory and Sveltana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia. In so doing, I'm deepening my understanding of what I've coined the incompleteness theory, articulating my impetus towards realist writing as an act undertaken in response to ruminative nostalgia.
Julia Prendergast (Tue,) studied this question.