Memory, Commemoration, Testimony

Catalog description

In this course we will study problems of remembering and forgetting in a variety of texts including poetry, philosophy, psychoanalysis, memoirs, public monuments, memory studies and trauma theory. We will explore the roles of language and representation in dealing with the past, the temporality of the self, the operation of the unconscious, the memorial and the monument. We will also look at the politics of memory in relation to the cultural traumas of slavery, the Holocaust, Viet Nam and 9/11. Readings from Rousseau, Hegel, Wordsworth, Proust, Derrida and de Man; Freud, Caruth, Saidiya Hartman, Segalen; Arendt and Reznikoff.