Revelation and Simultaneity: Cultural Memory and the Individual

Abstract

Individual memory includes more than one thinks: a palimpsest of entwined cultural texts and contexts. It is part of an endless intertext including past and present where our individual memories take up significance only as part of larger cultural contexts.Among other resources, we have autobiographical narratives, but also real or possible life stories circulating in our culture. Thus, autobiographical consciousness is just a small island of awareness in an unknown and unknowable wide sea.