Narrating the Americas: History and Film

Semester and Year	SP 2012
Course Number	IDSEM-UG1568
Section	001
Instructor	Lauren Walsh
Days	Tue,Thu
Time	11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Units	2.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement	HUM, GLOBAL

Description

The past two decades have witnessed what has come to be known as the “memory boom,” that is, a greater cultural as well as academic interest in the workings of remembrance and forgetting. At issue are crucial concerns, among them: how past events are written into history; how literature is a form of remembering; how language itself can fail to portray and thereby fail to remember certain traumatic events; and how a culture decides, collectively, what it will and will not recall about its own past. This course takes up these concerns in its examination of memory, especially as growing from three major historic events: World War I, The Holocaust, and 9/11. We consider how memory is narrated and explore the connections between place and modes of narration. Through our readings of works of fiction as well as theoretical texts, through film and analysis of sites of commemoration, we grapple with some of the most fundamental concerns of memory studies today, and in so doing we also explore the dynamic relationship between personal and collective memory. Students will write critical papers, visit a site of commemoration, respond to recent film on the subject of memory, and give a class presentation. Reading will include W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, and VirginiaWoolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

Course Type

Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)