Memory as obliteration -: On the relationship between cultural memorial spaces and their medial intervention in Victor!Hugo's 'Notre-Dame de Paris' and Les 'Miserables'

The memory spaces that Victor Hugo designs in his novels are charged with myth and designed to inspire meaning. One can read this as afictional compensationfor a crisis of remembrance in his age: textual monuments were to be erected next to monuments of stone. Hugo go also establishes a link between the cultural practices of remembrance and the historically changing media of storage. In Notre-Dame de Paris he develops a modern conception of text that is based on the idea of effacement, against the background of an unfolding of media change. A tension exists between the mythically charged lieux de memoire and Hugo's attempts to convey them in various media.