Evans examines the relationship between memory and history in Chaucer's romance Troilus, using Christopher Nolan's Memento to illustrate the important historical differences between the medieval and the postmodern. The essay draws on the work of French cultural historian Pierre Nora, who argues that history exists because memory no longer does and society is haunted by this loss. Memento, the author proposes, illustrates the contemporary obsession with .the precariousness of memory. and the crucial relationship between memory and identity. Evans argues that Memento serves as a .surreal projection. of what memory might look like if it were exteriorized and we were incapable of storing it in an internal filing system that allows us to retrieve it as needed. Due to the protagonist.s failure of this psychic archive, he creates a mnemonic system that employs a range of .prosthetics for memory,. such as tattoos, photographs, and notes. Evans compares this system to the techniques medieval monks utilized in the arts of preserving memory through authoritative texts. At the same time, the author suggests that because these are records of discrete and disconnected moments of objective reality, they are detached from a unifying chain of meaning and therefore useless to Leonard in structuring his past, present or future. This places the protagonist in a nightmare of double loss that of his wife and of his reliable mnemonic system. Evans deconstructs scenes from Memento to explore the film's distinctly humanist suggestion that memory is fundamental to one's survival as an individual and juxtaposes it to Chaucer's Troilus, which shares these anxieties of memory but without the radical separation between memory and history. The author stresses the distinctly occidental nature of this separation and argues that while medieval writers did not conflate memory and history, they had a dramatically different understanding of the relationship between the two.

Sibielski examines the history, identity, and failure of rationality as an ordering principle in Memento. Nolan's film illustrates the postmodern rejection of the founding principles of Enlightenment modernity, using narrative, visual and thematic elements to convey the increasingly blurred line between reality and hyperreality. The author argues that postmodern theory is both informed by and interested in popular culture, and this intersection has caused the debate over the nature of postmodernism to spill from academia into the popular culture realm. Memento, Sibielski suggests, is one of the cultural artifacts resulting from this dynamic, echoing the work of several postmodern theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, and Kevin Robins. Sibielski argues that the postmodern condition is characterized by a lost sense of history due to the perpetual reproduction of records, such as photographs and video footage, which has left society condemned to seek history through its own pop culture images and simulacra of that history. Memento's thematic symbolism reflects this confused quest for factual history, elevating rationality into the most reliable ordering principle through the actions of the protagonist, Leonard Shelby. Leonard's condition makes his existence a series of perpetual presents, self-contained in the immediate moment and detached from the events that precede them. To remedy this, he constructs a system of photographs and notes, which become his network of mediation that he relies on to transform his experience into a coherent and truthful one. Sibielski argues that the use of photographs reflects Enlightenment modernity's unconditional faith in the objectivity of scientific investigation and empirical research. Yet Memento turns this relationship into an inevitable paradox by introducing the ultimate failure of rationality as Leonard's Polaroids become the subject of shifting and subjective interpretations. This places Memento at the epicenter of the contemporary obsession with ordering and controlling the world, using knowledge as a means to the end of self-actualization, and unfolding the larger discourse of humanism and rationalism as they relate to the notion of objective knowledge.