The giants beneath: Cultural memory and literature in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Abstract

Drawing on the approaches of discussing the concept of memory within literary studies, as delineated by Erll and Nünning (2005), this paper examines The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro as a site of ‘memory of literature’ and as a ‘medium of cultural memory’. Reworking the well-known cultural motif of quest, Ishiguro’s novel also evokes associations with the medieval literary tradition, especially Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and contemporary fantasy literature, understood as a mode of writing rather than a formula. It is also argued that by referring to a fictional past of Arthurian romances rather than historiography, the novel comments on the role of literature in creating cultural remembrance, becoming a specific metaphor of its processes.