General Information
Course Description
9597 - Theories of Spatial and Dialogical Memory - Memory has been theorized from the perspectives of multiple disciplines, from cognitive psychology to history and sociology. Memory, commonly recognized as “the ways in which people construct a sense of the past,” has encouraged the examination of extraordinarily divergent social phenomena through collective memory studies. Yet with the advent of personal testimonies, of what Annette Wieviorka (2006), has named the “era of the witness,” an indubitable change of the landscape of memorialisation has taken place. All in all, great masses of forgotten meanings are now being recalled and invigorated, which raises questions about the prevailing idea that collective memory ensures cultural continuity, since those significant and contingent events are stable over time. But what happens when, after a number of years, the cultural continuity is contested? Even if we recognize the power of objects as containers of meaning, and the power of the place where objects are located, not all historical claims are of equal merit. Take for example the shifting of public memory in postwar Europe, or the character of war memorials, landscapes, villages, churches, mosques and cemeteries. Those in mourning use them not only for ceremony, but also for a ritual of separation, wherein touching a name indicates not only what has been lost, but also what has not been lost. Under this perspective, each memory is a viewpoint that changes as one’s position changes; and this position itself changes as one’s relationships to other milieus change. Thus Memory cannot be summoned unless it is anchored in geography. This structure of feeling where place and memory sustain each other relates to everyone.
In this course we will examine and appraise the theories and conundrums of memory in the following order:
1. The phenomenology of memory –Ricoeur; Benjamin; Casey, Bakhtin
2. The sociology of memory –Halbwachs; Connerton
3. The psychology of memory –cognitive psychology—psychoanalysis
4. The politics of memory –Iniguez, et al; Sa’di, & Abu-Lughod
5. The geography of memory –Nora; Casey, Bakhtin
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