Memory Metaphors

Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory is a hallmark of the surrealist movement. Dali famously described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs” and The Persistence of Memory is a prime example of that description. The Persistence of Memory depicts striking and confusing images of melting pocket watches and a mysterious fetus-like structure all sprawled over the dreamscape representation of Dali’s home of Port Lligat, Spain. Dali uses strange images, color, and shadows in The Persistence of Memory to convey an abstract view on dreams, time, and reality.

Hunger of Memory is an autobiography of the writer Richard Rodríguez and his transition from youth to manhood told through a series of recollected stories. The premise of his writing was centered mainly on his struggle to maintain both his Mexican heritage and closeness to his Spanish-speaking family, while at the same time being assimilated into American culture and obtaining an advanced education. Within the book Richard Rodríguez illustrates his contempt for affirmative action and bilingual education, two practices that had directly burdened his life while growing up. One of his main conflicts was grounded in his own family unintentionally being pulled away from him by

The purpose of the Memory Motifs project is to examine “how American Jews came to know stories about Holocaust survivors through American Jewish philanthropic activities in the immediate postwar period.” Furthermore, the exhibit was created to allow public knowledge on the subject to form their own opinions. Throughout memory motifs, the author uses several different primary sources to analyze how American Jews point of view on the holocaust and understand how the narratives were altered. The sources included fundraising pamphlets, magazine articles, posters, radio broadcasts, short films, institutional records and public ephemera. The data was transformed into a website in a wiki format. The main page links to information about several different

I am sitting on an inflatable tube in the middle of Lake Michigan. I’m not sure how I got here. Suddenly, I hear “Lean back!”; I’m not sure why, but I just lean back. I’m so scared, I don’t know what is happening. I see a big white boat with blue dual canvas start to go fast, and I feel a jerk. I don’t know what’s happening! Is the tube sinking? Am I going to drown? What is happening? The boat is now going fast, and I’m told I can sit up now. I am kneeling on the tube for five seconds, and I say “OH MY GOSH! This is so fun!!!”. I can’t believe that I have never done this before. I was being pulled so fast that the wind dried my face from the splashing fishy water. There is a wave and my knees fly almost a foot off of the tube! This is the

Where Things Come Back is an odd tale about the way loss can affect people. A young man by the name of Cullen Witter begins his senior year of highschool in the small static town of Lilly Arkansas. The town becomes infatuated with the supposed return of the long lost Lazarus Woodpecker. Cullen’s summer before his senior year of high school, he first experiences loss in the form of death. His cousin Oslo passed away due to drug abuse. His second loss is that of his brother, Gabriel Witter, who suddenly goes missing and disappears. Gabriel, Cullen, and Cabot Searcy’s lives are all eventually tied together because of a missionary named Benton Sage. Cullen Witter also experiences the feeling of loss in the form of love and second chances. This story shows that hope and finding one’s faith can all come together for one last chance.

Some historians still consider 1968 as one of the most tumultuous and convulsive years in American history since World War II. The Tet offensive was implemented in response to the Vietnam War, countercultural groups were reaching their peaks, and both presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. Sites that honor the memories of 1968 were given numerous forms in order to preserve the year in the way those present remembered it. Each form of preservation has some physical build. Some sites include a raised fist to symbolize the Black Panther Party’s uprising, the Fair Housing Act that represents the government’s stance

I felt The Impossible Knife of Memory was to pedestrian for a college-level course. In my belief, the author should have focused more on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and how it affects families and friends.

Metaphor: A metaphor is a form of speech that a word or phrase is given to an object or action. The object or action should not be literally applicable.

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.

The two concepts that I resonated with are Memory and the Psychodynamic theory. Starting with the Psychodynamic theory is an approach to psychology that studies the psychological forces underlying human behavior, feelings, and emotions, and how they may relate to early childhood experience. This theory is most closely associated with the work of Sigmund Freud, and with psychoanalysis, a type of psychotherapy that attempts to explore the patient’s unconscious thoughts and emotions so that the person is better able to understand him or herself. The second one is Memory; understanding how memory works will help you improves your memory. Which is an essential key to attaining knowledge. Memory is one of the important cognitive processes. Memory involves remembering and forgetting. I chose the two concepts because throughout the class they stood out to the most. Understanding the conscious, subconscious mind and also memory. I’m interested in understanding the human behavior.

American society has traditionally been referred to as a “melting pot,” welcoming people of all races, religions, and heritages to enjoy the “freedom” that only America could provide. That was not always the case, as incidents such as the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar and the Lewis and Clark journey along the Columbia River exhibited American racial intolerance and demonstrated the inherent racism of the Manifest Destiny—an ideal upon which this nation was founded. Today, government agencies such as the National Park Service (NPS) aim to repair the United States’ negative reputation by creating national historic sites, which serve as either a celebration of American history or an apologetic reminder of events that can never

Memory is defined as "the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information." Our memory can be compared to a computer's information processing system. To remember an event we need to get information into our brain which is encoding, store the information and then be able to retrieve it. The three-stage processing model of Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin suggests that we record information that we want to remember first as a fleeting sensory memory and then it is processed into a short term memory bin where we encode it ( pay attention to encode important or novel stimuli) for long-term memory and later retrieval. The premise for the three step process is that we are unable to focus on too much

Although visual art is looked upon differently by all, everyone has a either a favorite piece or at least something that catches their eye. Personally, I don’t have a piece of art that I would label my absolute favorite, but during a Spanish research project found that Salvador Dali’s work really stood out. “The Persistence of Memory” painted in 1931 by Dali, a highly renowned surrealist painter, is among the most interesting works I have ever seen. Even though the painting itself is rather simple in quality at first glance, what Dali’s must have been thinking about while creating this work is strikingly complex. The painting is attractive to me because it deals with the concept of time, something

is very different from the life he is now leading, and a life to which

In film, flashbacks are interruptions that take the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. They are often used to provide background and context to recount current events of a narrative filling in crucial backstories. In its basic form, the flashback is introduced when a presented image dissolves to another image of the past, which can be either as “a story-being-told or a subjective memory.” (Turim, pg. 1) For example, dream sequences and memories are methods used to present flashbacks. They become visual representation to the audience as an act of remembering past experiences of reality. Imagination also plays an important role in shaping the mind and the story similar to memories and the formation of reality. Imagination is usually integrated into animation as an artistic creation to express the artists’ ideas or memory. But where does the use of imagination and memories stop? By examining memory represented in animation and film, through Bartlett’s theory of schema, we can see how the film develops an active organized method to recognize reality through memory. This paper is examining five films based on the theme of memory, thus arguing that imagination does not distorted memory in animation, but create a role as a form of embellishment for the film to help memory.