SOURCE: Lobe, Cliff. “Reading the ‘Remembered World’: Carceral Architecture and Cultural Mnemonics in Peter Carey's Illywhacker.” Mosaic 35, no. 4 (December 2002): 17-34.

In the following essay, Lobe examines the postcolonial nature of Australian architecture and cultural memory as portrayed in Illywhacker.

Things are not universally correct in achitecture and universally incorrect in men.

—Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today”

Western architecture has always been close to memory. This proximity can be figured as two interrelated mnemonic modes: a systematizing of memory placement in which imagined built spaces (loci) are imposed upon an individual's memory in order to facilitate the recall of information, and a housing or dwelling in which memories of the past accumulate in architectural structures in the present. Such a subdivision of memory reflects two ways that architecture functions in the discourses of individual and cultural recall. The first of these is the technique of the ancient ars memoria, in...