ABSTRACT
This book began with a proposal that the long age of confession may now be giving way to the era of memory. It went on to suggest that this proposition would fit well with accounts of an epochal transition from modern to postmodern times. In the chapters that followed, however, I have argued that the proposal that the age of confession may now have been superseded by the era of memory simplifies what is, in fact, a far more complex picture. I have explored the sexual politics of time associated with two cultural modes, confession and nostalgia, the former of which has been associated with modernity, and the latter with postmodernity. My explorations of confession and nostalgia concluded that, from the vantage point of temporality, the categories of nostalgia and confession are themselves anything but homogeneous. If confession might more readily be associated with modernity, and nostalgia with postmodernity, I proposed that a focus on temporality and sexual difference problematized any such tidy alignment by showing that the complex and multiple sexual temporalities of confession and nostalgia do not map easily onto accounts of what have been taken to be the dominant temporalities of modernity and postmodernity. This raises questions concerning cultural theory’s constructions of epochs and cultural periods. While it is hardly ground-breaking to propose that the boundaries between cultural periods are porous and permeable, my study of confession and nostalgia points towards a more radical conclusion, for the sexually differentiated temporalities of confession and nostalgia may problematize established and now taken for granted accounts of the temporalities of modernity and postmodernity – a proposal that raises questions both about those mappings of epochal change and cultural periodization that place temporality at their centres and about the linear historical temporality
within which epochs and cultural movements are commonly mapped. In this final chapter, I want to bring this study of temporality and sexual difference to a close with a brief discussion of certain texts – memoirs and ‘memoirnovels’, poetry and prose – in which femininity and masculinity ‘remember’ or remake themselves in relation to parental figures and childhood memories. As Draaisma has pointed out, memory is ‘at the centre of our experience of time’ (Draaisma 2004: 203) and speaks ‘to the temporal axis of personhood’ (Antze and Lambek 1996: p. xxv). Since the literary genre of the memoir foregrounds memory’s relations with the temporalized self and ‘places the self relative to time’ (Hart 1970: 491), it is fitting that this book should end with a chapter in which the memoir takes centre stage.
