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In The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film , Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty locate their methodological approach "in the concepts or processes of memory, mediation, and remediation" (26). Their approach highlights that memory is not fixed (the flashbulb memories that feature so strongly in popular discourse and film), but something that "gets constituted, legitimized, 'naturalized,' replicated, and reproduced through narrative or visual media forms" (26). Understanding remediation as referring to both "mediation and its repetition" (18), Kilbourn and Ty draw attention to how memory changes not just through repetition but also through the media writers' and artists' use. Their concept of media extends beyond contemporary forms such as multimedia and twenty-first-century cinema, for included in this collection of fifteen essays are pieces on the construction of female mourning in World War One, writing by Gertrude Stein, the fiction of W. G. Sebald, Dionne Brand's Ossuaries , Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo , life-writing about the Holocaust, and Neil M. Gunn's autobiography The Atom of Delight .
While several contributors testify ironically to the complex terrain of memory studies when they make competing claims regarding the centrality of their area of research to these studies--for example, K. J. Keir on autobiography, Anders Bergstrom on cinema, and Kate Warren on re-enactments--what is most valuable in the collection is how individual essays challenge theoretical pieties. Exemplary here is Stefan Sereda's reading of the cinema of simulation's potential to challenge Jean Baudrillard's and Fredric Jameson's conclusions regarding the treatment of history in late capitalist film. Defining the cinema of simulation as "films that self-consciously provoke intersections among fiction, history, and media" (227), Sereda uses Steven Soderbergh's The Good German and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds to demonstrate how the cinema of...