Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject

by Sayer,Derek

• ISBN13: 9781594510410
• ISBN10: 1594510415
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-06-07
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

What is hidden in the taste of a madeleine cookie-or in snatches of Bob Dylan songs, operatic arias, and the remembered sting of a rattan cane? An exploration of memory, Going Down for Air artfully combines two very different yet connected texts. A Memoir is richly evocative not only of times past, but also of a very English, imperial, queerly masculine subjectivity, caught on the cusp of the extinction of the world in and of which it made sense. Derek Sayer's allusive writing succeeds as few have done before in capturing the leaps and bounds of memory itself. Rich in its detail, unstinting in its honesty, this beautifully written memoir is a considerable literary achievement. The memoir is complemented by Sayer's provocative theoretical essay on memory and social identity. Drawing on linguistic and psychoanalytic theory, photographic images, and literary texts, In Search of a Subject argues that it is memory above all that maintains the imagined identities upon which society rests.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
List of Photographs	xi
Prelude: Walter Benjamin's Cabinet	1	(8)
Notes	8	(1)
A Memoir	9	(130)
Notes	117	(22)
Oh, I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside	139	(4)
In Search of a Subject	143	(44)
The floating world	143	(5)
Drawing from memory	148	(6)
Freudian slip	154	(5)
Daydream believer	159	(8)
What's in a madeleine?	167	(8)
Footfalls in the memory	175	(5)
Notes	180	(7)
Index	187	(12)
Permissions	199	(2)
About the Author	201