Word: reconstructionalism
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...Undertaker is a first-person account, told from the undertaker's perspective, of a visit from a mother who has just lost her son in a gang- or drug-related slaying. The undertaker is charged with steeling himself against the gore, the blood and the tragedy in order to reconstruct the destroyed face and "exploded head" of the victim, so his mother's "dreams of her baby / in tuxedoed satin" can be fulfilled. Libert and Parker intersperse video of Smith's recitation of the poem with shadowy figures, discreet images of hands molding flesh onto the skull underneath and childhood...
Gilligan said the changing concepts of parenthood in light of employment and other external facts has created a need to "fundamentally reconstruct the idea of a woman" from older preconceptions...
...collection, All Around Atlantis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 244 pages; $23). Anna, of the title story, recalls her childhood living with her mother and the buried memories of aunts and uncles who died in Hitler's death camps. Overheard scraps of dinner-table conversation are not enough to reconstruct the past, so Anna uses her imagination. She starts by picturing a single barb on a wire, "its taper, its point, its torque, its dull gleam...
...Timothy Garton Ash, a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, reconstructing one's past involves a "continuous remixing of memory and forgetting." For much of 1980, while working on a doctorate in history, Garton Ash lived in East Berlin. Inevitably, he became an object of interest to East Germany's omnipresent secret police, known by the acronym Stasi. In The File (Random House; 262 pages; $23), Garton Ash, now 42, tries to reconstruct that year behind Berlin's Wall by comparing his private notes from the period with what he found in Stasi's newly opened records. Going further...
...until 1953, most of the sculpture that Europeans took from it ended up in France--notably at the Musee Guimet in Paris--rather than in England, Germany or America. But to deduce the scale, continuity and sheer aesthetic majesty of Cambodian art from such fragments is like trying to reconstruct a loaf from a single crumb...