As I stated in the initial post to this blog, I am teaching an honors seminar on memory this semester (which begins on Monday). At my institution, only first-year honors students may register for the class, but it is later opened to all honors-eligible undergraduates. There are three seminars offered this semester, on a variety of topics. Professors may choose to teach the course one day a week for the entire semester, or two days per week, with the class ending at midterm. Due to the thematic nature of our class, I chose to offer the seminar twice a week. The class is only a one credit hour course, and we will have just two hours per week together. Still, I am absolutely thrilled to be teaching this class (in fact, I volunteered to do so).
I have just completed the course syllabus, and I would like to share that document with anyone who might be interested. Please feel free to comment, suggest additional readings, or share pedagogical insights if you have taught any of these, or similar, texts. I'd be more than happy to read your remarks and respond to them here.
One of the challenges I encountered in planning the syllabus was the sheer volume of material that is available out there regarding memory and amnesia. We always have to choose texts carefully for classes we'll be teaching, but especially when the course is going to be so brief. As I state in the course description, I opted to focus less on the traumatic historical events themselves -- that is, what happened -- and more on how those events were (and are) remembered, both by survivors and subsequent generations. Interestingly, I thought I would dedicate a rather large portion of the class to the Spanish Civil War, because that is what my research is in. However, in the end, the syllabus kind of took on its own life, and we'll spend a decent amount of time on 9-11. Perhaps, this is only natural. I just received a copy of Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, and I also re-watched Man on Wire over break.
In any case, I'll be reporting on the class from time to time here. Students may also have the opportunity to post articles and commentary on this blog.
Learning is acquiringg new skills and memory is remembering what we have learned.You can't have memory without learning.Your article is good informative.I will try to follow your each new post.
ReplyDeleteExcellent outline, thank you for sharing it. I wanted to point you to some works of postmemory coming out of Japan, more details over at a new blog by Dougal McNeill that might well be of interest to you generally.
ReplyDeletesd card - thank you for your comment.
ReplyDeleteGiovanni, thanks for the link to the blog. I will check it out. I'm really interested in how "postmemory" has been deployed theoretically in other historical contexts, but also in other literatures.
Egunon, Engrama,
ReplyDeleteWinfried Georg Sebald's terrific, and terrorific, book On the natural history of destruction might find home on this site. Sebald asks how the murder from the air, the burning alive, of 600,000 German civilians during the allied air campaign has barely registered in German discourse and art, in any genre, then or since. His answer: willful communal amnesia. Sebald's vista stretches beyond: for instance, in my own research I have asked why, or how, the history of the French deplorable treatment of the Spanish exiles (resulting in the death of tens of thousands) has been ignored, or buried, by history's chronicles, and I think Sebald comes up with an answer, indirectly, when he writes that Germany (and I would add France, and all of Europe) was constructing a frantic lie—a mass of individuals intent on building self-interested myths and intentional amnesia. The subsequent Reconstruction was yet another form of destruction: "tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation's own past history, [which] prohibited any look backward."
Stewart James-Lejárcegui