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Sorensen, Eli Park. “Melancholy Memories and Literary Language.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 38.2 (2012): 129-149. In this article, I want to explore the problematic of dealing with narratives that precede oneself, one’s life; past narratives that in various ways influence the present, our lives here and now. I will look at Naipaul’s encounter with the English rural landscape, one that is partly informed by his literary memories. This encounter is reminiscent of Freud’s notion of hysteria, one that captures some of the profound disorientation that preceding historical narratives might impose on our present lives. Hysteria furthermore echoes vaguely in Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which constitutes an extreme version of the idea that preceding narratives might overshadow the present. Implicit in both Naipaul’s and Hirsch’s problematic relation to the past is the possibility that the past remains unverifiable, and, therefore, potentially non‐existent. One finds such a dynamic in Freud’s notion of melancholia, which Freud himself explicitly relates to the phenomenon of hysteria. This is further explored in Paul Auster’s semi‐autobiographical text The Invention of Solitude in which Auster affirms the necessity of literary language, as a redemptive principle of connectedness, one by which the past’s visibility eventually is secured. (Seoul National University)