Prof. Weinbaum
Memory and Forgetting: Literature as Archive
This seminar will examine literature’s involvement in the creation and contestation of narratives about the past, and thus in the writing and/or erasure of individual and/or collective memory and history. This is, of course, a pressing concern in the present conjuncture—one in which the idea of historical “truth” is under siege, and in which what gets taught in classrooms throughout the United States is hotly debated, and, in some instances, legally restricted. While all literary texts (fiction and non-fiction alike) implicitly create narratives about the past as part of their world building, our focus in this seminar will be on texts that deliberately dwell on issues of historical narration, remembrance, and forgetting in a manner that is self-reflective. More specifically, we will focus on novels, graphic novels, and memoires that thematize questions of how we remember the past; what we remember about the past; what stories we understand to be part of our collective memory; how we memorialize or archive the past; how we forget the past; how “the powers that be” disavow the past; and, not least, how and why questions about what is remembered, memorialized, forgotten and disavowed matter in the present moment of reading.
In addition to treating a selection of 4-5 primary texts drawn from the list below (nb: still provisional), we will read several key theoretical texts on concepts such as archive, individual memory, collective memory, forgetting, and historical disavowal or erasure. The writing goal is production of a 10 to 12 page research paper (on a text of your choice), that directly engages the seminar’s questions and concerns. Papers will be developed in stages including abstracts, annotated bibliographies, and drafts. Sessions on building research skills and feedback on drafts will be integrated into the quarter.
Primary texts: Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night; Eva Hoffmann, After Such Knowledge; Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; Lois Lowry, The Giver Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline; Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police; Rivers Solomon, The Deep.
Theoretical intertexts by Aleida Assmann, Walter Benjamin, Dionne Brand, Masha Gessen, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, and Michael Rothberg.