Memories in Dialogue: Transnational Stories About Communist Childhoods

SMC Author

Helga Lenart-Cheng

SMC Affiliated Work

1

Status

Faculty

School

School of Liberal Arts

Department

World Languages and Cultures

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2017

Publication / Conference / Sponsorship

Memories of Post (Socialist) Childhood and Schooling

Editor

Silova I., Piattoeva N., Millei Z.

Publisher/Venue

London: Palgrave MacMillan

Description/Abstract

The chapter is an auto-duo-ethnographic exercise carried out by two scholars of life-writing, who grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s in Hungary and Romania. They draw on life-writing scholarship and memory studies in order to engage with the post-socialist representations of childhood, as well as the methodological challenges that accompany such narratives. Their personal narratives allow paradoxes to coexist, and cast into doubt the inherited paradigms of the “communist child” as an icon of socialist utopia, or a traumatized victim of the repressive regime. The chapter also investigates the role of autobiographical narratives in the process of witnessing and suggests that their co-construction of each other as witnesses can never be about confirmation, but only about the articulation of their mutual co-exposure.

Scholarly

yes

DOI

10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_2

ISBN

978-3-319-62790-8

First Page

19

Last Page

40

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Modern Languages

Original Citation

Lénárt -Cheng, Helga. “Memories in Dialogue: Transnational Stories About Communist Childhoods.” Memories of Post (Socialist) Childhood and Schooling. London: Palgrave MacMillan. 2017.

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