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HEIndividual fellowship2023–2025

MemMod · Memories of the Moderns: Life-Writing and Literary History

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2023-08-01 → 2025-07-31
EU contribution
€189,687
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Results in brief

Memories of the Moderns: Life-Writing and Literary History

MemMod investigated how memoirs, diaries, and biographies shape the way we understand literary modernism, using James Joyce and key mediators of his life and legacy as a central case study. In Joyce studies, accounts such as Sylvia Beach’s memoir ‘Shakespeare and Company’ and Richard Ellmann’s biography ‘James Joyce’ are often treated as authoritative sources. These accounts have become so foundational that their inaccuracies and blind spots are now deeply embedded in the field, shaping interpretations for decades. Yet these recollections are themselves products of memory: selective, revised, and sometimes contradictory. MemMod addressed this challenge by drawing on memory studies, an interdisciplinary field at the crossroads of the humanities and social sciences. This perspective shows why certain narratives about Joyce endure, despite contradictory archival evidence. The project’s objectives were to: • develop a theoretical framework for studying modernist life-writing through the lens of memory studies; • conduct archival research into the creation and circulation of influential memoirs and biographies; • prepare an annotated edition of ‘The Book of Days’, the previously unpublished Trieste diary of Stanislaus Joyce. By addressing the problem of how memory circulates and endures in scholarship, MemMod contributes to more reliable accounts of literary history that better reflect the diversity of voices and contexts shaping modernism. It provides new critical tools for researchers and resources for students, teachers, and the wider public interested in Joyce, modernism, and European cultural heritage. Anticipated impacts include more reliable research, renewed attention to overlooked voices, and alignment with EU commitments to diversity and open science. Through these objectives, MemMod sets the scene for rethinking how we write and transmit literary history, and how early foundational accounts shape the humanities.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

The degree to which experimental writers of the early twentieth century drew on their own life stories for creative expression is a commonplace of both the critical and popular receptions of modernism. Less recognised, however, is the role that forms of life-writing from memoir to biographical fiction still play in our literary histories of the period. The primary research aim of MemMod is to document the ways in which representations of personal memory not only inform literary history but also constitute the shared collective memory of a research community. The project offers a case study of James Joyce (18821941), one of the most admired, emulated, and mythologised masters of twentieth-century prose and about whom many stories circulate in the research community and among the general public. Drawing on memory studies for its theoretical framework, MemMod will explore the archives of Sylvia Beach (18871962), Frank Budgen (18821971), Stanislaus Joyce (18841955), and Richard Ellmann (19181987), all of whom penned influential accounts of Joyce, to identify and unpack stories that are central to our understanding of the modernist period. MemMod will examine why these narratives have such staying power in the construction of modernism, even as research and new evidence dramatically reshape our accounts of the past. Research objectives are to develop a theoretical framework from memory studies in order to engage with the marginal textual forms of modernist life-writing; to determine how memoirists and biographers represent personal memory by conducting on-site archival research; and to edit, annotate, and introduce a diary covering Joyces life in Trieste from 1907 to 1909 and to publish and publicise it among researchers and the general public. Project outputs will include three peer-reviewed articles in high quality journals; a podcast on collective memory and research communities; and a published edition of Stanislaus Joyces Trieste diary.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITAET FRANKFURT AM MAIN · Frankfurt Am MainCoordinatorGermany

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union