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List of contents
Introduction: Why Didion? Why the ‘Ethics of Memory’?
1. ‘Earthquake Weather’: Didion’s Universe
2. Memories are what you no longer want to remember: Witnessing, Testifying, and Grieving
3. The Norm of Comprehensiveness: Nostalgia, Forgiveness, and Critical Fabulation
4. Political Memory and Memory as Politics: Critical Political Realism and Neoliberal Life Narrative
Conclusion: Joan Didion and the Future: Philosophical Unsettlement and the Right to be Forgotten
Notes
Bibliography
About the author
Matthew R. McLennan is Associate Professor in the School of Ethics, Social Justice and Public Service, Saint Paul University / Université Saint-Paul, Canada
Summary
Looking at the breadth of Joan Didion’s writing, from journalism, essays, fiction, memoir and screen plays, it may appear that there is no unifying thread, but Matthew R. McLennan argues that ‘the ethics of memory’ – the question of which norms should guide public and private remembrance – offers a promising vision of what is most characteristic and salient in Didion’s works.
By framing her universe as indifferent and essentially precarious, McLennan demonstrates how this outlook guides Didion’s reflections on key themes linked to memory: namely witnessing and grieving, nostalgia, and the paradoxically amnesiac qualities of our increasingly archived public life that she explored in famous texts like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking and Salvador. McLennan moves beyond the interpretive value of such an approach and frames Didion as a serious, iconoclastic philosopher of time and memory.
Through her encounters with the past, the writer is shown to offer lessons for the future in an increasingly perilous and unsettled world.
Foreword
The first book to examine Joan Didion's writing and philosophy using 'the ethics of philosophy' as its starting point.
Additional text
In his bracing analysis of Didion's "ethics of memory," Matthew McLennan gives us a Didion both self-pitying and tough, a writer whose devastating personal loss resonates with a vast public readership. His account of Didion as a moral teacher whose pessimism saves her from nihilism casts her in an important new light.
