Talk about the Past

Abstract

Like the other essays in this special issue, my analysis centers on the interview segment collected in the TRANSMEMO project and discussed in the data workshop organized by Thomas van de Putte at the University of Trento. I argue that collaborative narratives, such as this interview segment, can serve as a model for better understanding and describing the process of shared meaning-making. The production of meaning in collaborative narrative is not a proxy for the phenomenon that we call memory or remembering. Rather it is the phenomenon. Paying close attention to narrative and language as it is practiced in the interview segment, I argue that we should understand collective memory as a relational achievement that is always polysemous, incomplete, and open to ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation.