محمد مطیعی

Kazuo Ishiguro explores human emotions, trauma, and love in his novels, with memory playing a central role in shaping characters' identities. This study, drawing on Jan Assmann's cultural memory theory, investigates the role of memory in shaping individual and collective identities in Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills. The study explores how personal and cultural memories influence characters' perceptions, beliefs, and interactions, shaping their sense of self and societal integration. It highlights how suppressed memories, unresolved traumas, shared historical memories, and societal narratives contribute to identity formation. Characters in the novel navigate trauma, loss, and identity construction amidst cultural memory and spatial dislocation. The experiences of characters like Etsuko and Sachiko illustrate the crucial role of memory in shaping individual and collective identities. The study reveals the intricate interplay between personal and collective memory as depicted through Etsuko's reflections on past tragedies and societal contexts in the novel. Ishiguro's exploration of memory, trauma, and identity construction showcases the profound impact of memories on both personal and collective identities. The findings demonstrate how the past continues to shape the present and influence personal and shared cultural histories.

The present article attempts to demonstrate how Don DeLillo’s Libra addresses the lack of social justice because of the domination of paranoia and conspiracy in the contemporary American society. John Rawls, the late Harvard University professor, has written about a just society and a utopian world in his major works. In Libra , DeLillo explores the assassination of Kennedy by Oswald and its adverse effect on society in general. In this novel, paranoia is experienced as paranoid schizophrenia, in which sufferers exhibit traits of both of them. Although Libra is based on historical events and real-life figures, it is not an attempt to produce a historically accurate version of these events. DeLillo does not aim to explain what really happened on that day, or establish an unequivocally true account of the assassination conspiracy. Rather, he uses the character of the conspirator Everett’s young daughter Suzanne to portray the disturbing paranoid state. By combining fragmented reality and evoked paranoid responses DeLillo is producing a work of literature by illustrating how this paranoid schizophrenia breeds social disease. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to illustrate there is no social justice in this paranoid postmodern world.