Memory Culture

ART 908

A wide range of creative and social practices are deployed in the production of memory culture from diaries to monuments, documentaries to quilts. Artists shape memory in the visual and performing arts, in literature and in architecture. Citizens produce diaries and participate
in truth and reconciliation commissions. Psychoanalysts and novelists deal with recovered memories as well as false memories. Journalists and historians uncover and reevaluate evidence. Rhetoricians and linguists are concerned with memory’s discursive formations. Advertising agencies and tourism boards use nostalgia as a marketing device. Governments
conjur memories that produce a sense of shared nationality and marginal communities actively engage in articulating and preserving memories that may not appear in official histories. Whether personal or political, memory is never passive. It can be a conservative or a constructive force. Memory plays as important a role in identity formation as it does in community formation. Memory can be considered through its individual and institutional dimensions, as well as through critical interventions. While the personal, psychological aspects of memory will be considered, the primary focus of the course will be on cultural memory.

This seminar will sample from the extensive literature on memory culture in a number of disciplines. Participants should expect to read, write, discuss, and produce memory culture.