Every memoir is a work of the imagination where personal observations, lived experiences and recollected memories are pulled together and made into a story.  Memoirs are both historical documents and literary narratives; creative works and social records.

This module asks questions about the relationship between how we remember and how we articulate or represent memory and memory making.  It draws on literary, historical, philosophical and creative approaches to individual and communal memory practices and considers how such practices change over time.  A key focus is the interrogation of the memoir as history and the memoir as art.  We analyse the subjective processes of selective memory making that are shared across literary and historical memoirs as well as examining how an individual life story generates broader historical meaning in wider national contexts and traditions.

This course will assess these questions by focussing on Timothy O’Grady’s and Stephen Pyke’s I Could Read The Sky (1997). ‘Every book, like every blackbird, is different,’ writes John Berger in his introduction to this compelling and important fictional memoir. And there is no book quite like I Could Read The Sky: it is a collaborative text that combines historical archival work, a lyrical narrative by Timothy O’Grady and black-and-white documentary photography by Steve Pyke.

At its most basic, it tells the story of one man’s journey from the West of Ireland to the towns and cities of England, a history of Ireland’s complex migration patterns and an individual account of love and loss and regret. The book is told as an act of memory: the narrator finds himself alone at the end of the twentieth century, looking back across decades of a life lived between our two islands.  The full force of the collision of dislocation and belonging that afflicts the emigrant is everywhere apparent in the written and visual text. Music becomes a focal point for this collision throughout the text as a binding tie to home and fundamental expression of emigrant traditions abroad.

This experience of Irish emigration is both fictional and a creative expression of historical reality. It is the memory of one man and the history of a people. Our purpose is to tease out these apparent contradictions and to come to some conclusions about what constitutes memoir, memory work, history and fiction.