The Persistence of Memory in Twentieth-Century Literature

Theories of Time

Einstein and his Theory of Relativity

From the British Broadcasting Company, a lively account of the possibilities of time travel that includes an explanation of Einstein’s conception of time-space.
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From the Public Broadcasting System, a comparison of Newton and Einstein and the impact of their discoveries on science and human life.
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A New York Times book review of Arthur I. Miller’s Einstein, Picasso, published in 2001, which parallels Einstein’s discovery of the theory of relativity in 1905 with Picasso’s groundbreaking painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), without arguing that the one directly influenced the other.
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In the online journal Slate, David Greenberg refutes the notion promoted by the editors of Time Magazine, who in 2000 declared Einstein the Man of the Century, that his work directly influenced the development of modernism.
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An article by Robert J. Bliwise, “Life, the Universe, and Einstein: Shaking Up the Cosmos.”
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Time and the Railroad

From the Library of Congress site, a discussion of the invention of standard time in the United States and a variety of other technological innovations that attempted to regularize the measurement of time.
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Freud

Critical notes on Freud’s assumptions in “Dora,” from a course called “Freud and the Literary Imagination” maintained by the University of Washington.
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From the English Department at Purdue University, a hyperlinked Module on Freud that outlines his theory of repression.
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Proust

An article from the BBC on the famous photographs of horses in motion taken by Eadwaerd Muybridge in the 1880s shows how complicated it is to capture a moment in time. Compare Proust’s comments on the movement of running horses.
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The Nobel Prize biography of Henri Bergson.
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T. S. Eliot

A comprehensive hyperlinked Web site dedicated to the study of The Waste Land created by Robert Parker.
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An illustrated essay on the Fisher King from a student site at the University of Idaho dedicated to the study of Arthurian legends.
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Witnessing the Holocaust

A biographical sketch of the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel.
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A biographical sketch of the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, Imre Kertesz of Hungary.
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The Web site of the United States Holocaust Museum.
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Bernard Dadie

From the University of Florida, a biographical sketch of Dadie with a few short excerpts from some poems and a note on his influence on Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film Amistad.
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A retelling of an African tale that suggests why Aiwa is successful when she washes her black cloth in a spring beneath a banana tree.
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Another article from Purdue’s site, by Brent Dean Robbins of Duquesne University, which talks about the fairy tale and its relationship to changing ideas of the child.
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Juan Rulfo and Pedro Paramo

A general introduction to the work of Juan Rulfo, with a useful discussion of the cristero rebellion that figures in Pedro Paramo.
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Images of the cristero rebellion (1926-29) from the Latin American Studies Organization.
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Pictures of Pancho Villa, leader of the Villistas who attack the Paramo gang in Rulfo’s novel (see p. 2680), with a link to an essay about the 1917 encounter between Villa’s army and the United States Army after a raid on a town in New Mexico.
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Visual Art

An essay on “Perspective, Viewpoint and Cubism,” from the Web site of the Tate Collection, which explains that a Cubist painter, like Braque, invites the viewer to “peer under, over and around the objects” on a canvas.
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From the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a commentary on and reproduction of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931).
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Texts and Contexts: D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce

The opening section of the authoritative biography of D. H. Lawrence by John Worthen, published in 1997, from The University of Nottingham, where Lawrence’s papers are kept.
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This article by Dirk Van Hulle of the James Joyce Center at the University of Antwerp, copyright to The Literary Encyclopedia, discusses the centrality of time in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the special emphasis placed on time and space in “The Fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper.”
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Andrzej Duszenko, Professor of English at Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota, “The Theory of Relativity in Finnegans Wake.”
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