Extended Remembering: Georges Perec and Writing as Thinking

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat are the relations among writing, thinking, and remembering? This article sets forth the epistemological claim that Georges Perec’s book W, or the Memory of Childhood is an integrated part of Perec’s cognitive process of remembering. By drawing on the extended mind thesis, as well as recent work on memory within cognitive science, it argues that Perec’s cognitive processes are extended into his text and, furthermore, that they are partly accessible to his readers. This approach thus sidesteps many of the debates regarding the author’s intention in literary studies by arguing that what is at stake in W is not whether Perec’s intention is deducible or not by the text, but rather how much and in what way the author’s extended thought processes are available in the text. In the conclusion, some of the implications of this view for the study of fictionalized accounts of the past are sketched out.