Middling memories and dreams of oblivion: configurations of a non-archival memory in Baudelaire and Proust

Part One: Science versus Art: From the new to the Classical

If I ask you to remember a particular circumstance from your childhood, do you remember nothing else but fragments--certain colors, smells, or sounds? Or do you remember entire pageants that appear whole and intact--a certain summer day, or a winter evening? Perhaps, you would argue, it hangs on the memory. Sometimes you remember a clean image; at other times you remember single isolated fragments. If you think this, you would have the support of many philosophers. Aristotle, for example, insists upon the difference. A remembrance stores the past incident entirely intact. ...