A Model for the Class I Hope to Teach

Professor Francie Cate-Arries is the author of the influential Spanish Culture Under Barbed Wire. Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps.1939-45 (2004). She also led what must have been an amazing class -- to teach and to take -- on memory in Madrid:



I am beginning to lay the groundwork for a similar project that has come out of the four-way intersection of post-dissertation research, a class I taught on contemporary literature and film of the Spanish Civil War, a Memory Studies honors seminar and the personal ties I have formed thanks to my Spanish blog. The class I envision will be taught partially in the United States and partially in situ. It will be interdisciplinary in nature and feature an extended, yearly field trip to one or several "sites of memory," which will vary. Hopefully, it will be team-taught. Perhaps, my teaching partner will alternate. I expect to bring together the study of literature and culture, psychology and history/politics.

As I outline the course, research locations and consider practical issues, I come back repeatedly to my concerns about memory tourism and how to prevent this sort of encounter or experience. Certainly, studying this issue will be essential prior to any potential interactions with survivors and/or their descendants, as well as the physical locations we might inhabit temporarily. I think that careful, frequent reflection will be key, as well as a clearly-outlined rationale and purpose prior to any excursion here or abroad.

Currently, I am reading Memory and the Future, because, as the editors state in the introduction, "For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies is inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself -- and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized -- can potentially hinder efforts to move forward" (1). As I have used literature and film to discuss memory and amnesia, I have come to realize that scholars have neglected memory's future. What is the future of memory?

I will report more on developments in the above endeavor in the coming months.

Next on My Reading List: new book on Digital Media and Forgetting

The memory seminar I was teaching ended last week. First, to be clear, I am a Spanish professor, and I love teaching Spanish language, literature and culture. And, I love doing so in the language! But when the opportunity to teach the honors seminar in English presented itself, I took it on as a challenge. At first, teaching in English was a bit like returning home after a long time abroad. I found it kind of surreal to use my English voice, especially with students I had last semester in Spanish class. I think some of it had to do with the fact that teaching in English (or in one's native language, and to speakers of that language) removes some of the communication "scaffolding" that is always present in introductory and intermediate language courses. That is, because you spend less time working on conveying the message (Am I conjugating my verbs right? How's my pronunciation? Is someone going to make fun of me? Will my interlocutor understand what I'm trying to say?), you spend more time zeroing in on the message itself. In both cases, professor and student brains are just as lit up and engaged, but the focus can be different. In any case, teaching the memory seminar was an invigorating experience, and I learned a lot from my students. I will comment in greater depth on the course at some other time, but for today, I'd like to address forgetting, a topic I feel has really been....well, forgotten, by memory scholars.

Yesterday, while on a vacation-time excursion to my local research library and independent bookstore, I happened upon a book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton UP, 2009). The title struck me immediately, for a variety of reasons. First, because the memory seminar ended with several readings that addressed forgetting; second, because I am working on a conference paper dealing with amnesia; and last, because as a blogger who posts primarily on historical and political matters, I cannot help but be hyper aware of the need to catalog everything.

Blogging is about stopping time and recording everything, or establishing a record. It is a bit like trying to press pause on the flood of continual information coming at us from all sides. But blogging also seems fearful of the past, because what counts is what is going on now, which will be old as soon as I get to the end of this sentence. What happens to the information being "logged"? As Andrew Sullivan writes in The Atlantic, blogging "is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in." And, I would add, the consequences for our memory as well.
In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines a fresh idea -- the need to forget in a time in which the abundance of information threatens to drown us. I think of one of my students, who remarked on the challenges of sifting through data for class research projects; or myself, as I drafted my dissertation -- was more information always better, when more information was "never enough"?

I am thinking more and more about where forgetting comes into all the discourse on memory. I would like to believe we are beyond the stale dichotomy of "memory, good, forgetting, bad," but that seems doubtful. How do we talk about forgetting in the context of historical trauma? How does forgetting enable new memories to develop and transform existing narratives? And, where does new media come into the discussion? I read Marc Augé's Oblivion in January, and recently re-read Paul Connerton's "Seven Types of Forgetting" (along with several of the articles written in response to the latter in Memory Studies, such as "Should We Forget Forgetting?"). I did not buy Delete, but I hope to check it out very soon and report back here after I've had a chance to evaluate it properly. For now, I leave you with this informative lecture by Mayer-Schönberger, and a few other helpful related links on his book:



Interview with the author on NPR

Princeton University Press Technology & Media blog (with links to additional interviews with the author)

Review of the book by Peter Cliff, Software Engineer at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

On Teaching Memory

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.