Karen Brennan: Memory, Dream, Story and the Recovery of Narrative (July 1996)

Memory always implies a gap, Karen Brennan notes, implies what is forgotten, against which it constructs “the narratives that keep our lives going forward to the next thing.” Her talk explores memory as a neurological process, discusses ways it can be injured and altered, and how memory uses fragment and dream to reconstruct narratives, even in pathological situations. She draws on memoir, a moving personal story, and Barthelme’s “The Falling Dog” and Joyce’s Ulysses to consider the mind’s narrative imperative.