France and Its Ghosts: History, Memory And Monuments

Catalog description

This course explores the ever-haunting debate over memory and its role in French national history with one central inquiry: how does a nation and its communities narrate their own traumatic past and deal with their own lingering ghosts? To answer this question, students will examine the social, political and aesthetic dynamics at stake in the process of memorialization (the selecting, silencing, revising) and how this redacted history still impacts France today as it faces heated debates about race, identity and immigration as well as growing demands for recognition, reparation and representation. This investigation will take students through the evolution and the role of historiography and the analysis of iconographic texts, such as monuments, memorials, photographs, paintings, comic strips, and films.