Abstract

All These Old Things is a work concerned with history, time, and memory, and how a single object can transport one into the labyrinth of the past. Each chapter takes as its focal point a collectible object, a relic of sorts, and constructs a series of histories and stories around that object using a blend of fact and fiction. Inspired by the theoretical writings of Walter Benjamin, the work is a redemptive one, in as much as it endeavours to salvage the traces of the past that are stored in these relics, through the reminiscences and anecdotes of those who collect them. It is, like Proust's mémoire involuntaire , concerned with the way in which objects can function as mnemonic devices, triggering memories deeply submerged and nearly forgotten. Stylistically, as well as conceptually, the work is very much indebted to the historical novels of W. G. Sebald, specifically, The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Austerlitz (2001). Following Sebald's model, the work relies on the first person narration of a single narrator through which other voices and their stories are rendered. Like Sebald's, this work makes a number of obvious intertextual references, and is composed with long sentences, few paragraph breaks, and no quotation marks--all, towards a historical metaphysics in which memory is free to traverse time and space.