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A better understanding of memory, and of the social forms in which it remains active in the present, will improve our approaches to learning from and teaching about the past.

This seminar on the relation of memory to trauma and responsibility focuses on how humans deal with loss. It takes up three major approaches to memory: psychoanalysis (Freud), social organization (Halbwachs), and associative temporalities (Sebald). It examines various genres in which the memory of loss is retained or displaced (personal memoires, comic books, films, memorials, money, religious stories), and the various cultural landscapes and histories in which such memories are recalled or repressed. Memory is the process of recalling something learned, experienced, or imagined in the past; it employs narrative to organize experience into events. Another way to frame the topic is to ask how the past is experienced in the interplay of individual and collective memories, and how it comes to be construed in meaningful stories in the present.

Close reading texts of various genres.

Over the final three sessions, students will be asked to write two short 3 pp., double-spaced memos (in German or English) on the readings. Memos will not be summaries of readings but instead will point to interconnections between readings and raise important issues to be discussed. All students will be asked to participate in the discussion. The afternoon session (except on the final day) will explicate the film, which you are to see on your own the evening before. It is vitally important that you come to class having read and screened the material (readings and films).  Final grade will be based on the two memos and a final paper (5-7 pp.), due a week after the final session.

Monday. Psychoanalysis

Jorge Borges, “Fumes the Memorious,” Labyrinths, 59-66, N.Y.: A New Directions Book, 1962.

Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad”, 227-232.

Sigmund Freud, "The Meaning of Symptoms," 268-283, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Washington Square Press, 1960.

Sigmund Freud, "Fixation upon Traumas," 284-296.  A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.  N.Y.: Washington Square Press, 1960.

Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 164-179.  General Psychological Theory.  N.Y: Collier Books, 1963.

Dan Baum, “The Price of Valor: We train our soldiers to kill for us.  After that they are on their own,” pp. 44-53. The New Yorker, July 12, 2004.

View: In Treatment, Alex, Series 1

Tuesday. Social Organization

Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory. New York: Harper and Row, 1980, 50-87.   

Pierre Nora, General Introduction: Between Memory and History.  In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions.  1996 (1992). N.Y.: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-23.

Antoine Prost, “Monuments to the Dead.” In Nora, Realms of Memory, Vol. 2, 307-32.

Antoine Prost, "The Algerian War in French collective memory," Ch. 7, 161-176. In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, Cambridge: CUP, 1999.

Film: Caché, Michael Haneke, director, 2005 (French with English subtitles).

Wednesday. Associative Temporalities

W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants. N.Y.: New Directions, 1996 (Three chapters: Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Max Ferber)

W.G. Sebald, “A Natural History of Destruction,” pp. 66-77. The New Yorker, Nov. 4, 2002.

Lawrence Kirmayer, Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation," 173-198. In Antze and Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge UP, 1996.

Film: “Waltz with Bachir,” Ari Folman, director, 2008

Thursday. Responsibility: Commemoration, Time, Form

Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. NY: Pantheon, 1986.

Elena Lappin, “The Man with Two Heads,” Granta 66 (Summer 1999), pp. 9-65.

Timothy Ryback, "Evidence of Evil" (on Auschwitz), The New Yorker, Nov. 15, 1993, pp. 68-81.

James E. Young, "The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today," Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267-296.

John Borneman, “Modes of Accountability: Events of Closure, Rites of Repetition,” 3-33. In Political Crime and the Memory of Loss, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Emmanuel Sivan, "Private pain and public remembrance in Israel," Ch. 8, 177-204. In Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 1999.

Recommended Reading

Narrativity

Hayden White, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality, The Content of the Form.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987, 1-25.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Sorcerer and His Magic," Structural Anthropology.  New York: Anchor Books, 1967, 161-180.

Michel de Certeau, "Discourse Disturbed: The Sorcerer's Speech," 245-268, In The Writing of History.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1992.

Story, Discourse, and Plot

Jonathan Culler, Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative.  The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1983, pp. 169-187.

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984, pp. 3-36.

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 1-40. Austin: U of Texas Press

Memory and Trauma

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, pp. 1-24. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Alexandra Fuller, “The Soldier,” pp. 54-67. The New Yorker, March 1, 2004.

Ann Stoller, Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture 23:1 (2011): 121-156.

Film

Film: Mother (2009), director Bong Jung-Ho (Korean with subtitles)

Memory and the Real

Slavoj Zizek, "You Only Die Twice," pp. 131-149; "Which Subject of the Real?" pp. 153-173.  In Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology.  New York: Verso, 1989

Mourning and Commemoration

In Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 1999: selections below:

Samuel Hynes, "Personal Narratives and Commemoration," Ch. 9, 205-221;

Catherine Merridale, "War, death, and remembrance in Soviet Russia," Ch. 3, 61-83;

Samuel Hynes, "Personal Narratives and Commemoration," Ch. 9, 205-221;

Paloma Aguilar, "Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers," Ch. 4, 84-103.

Pierre Sorlin, "Children as war victims in postwar European cinema," Ch. 5, 104-124.

Memory Displacement and Accountability

Rosalind Shaw, “Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone,” Cultural Anthropology 27 (1) (2007):66-93.

Chapters from John Borneman, Political Crime and the Memory of Loss, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011.

. "Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, and Affiliation," 61-78. 

“On Money and the Memory of Loss,” 33-48.

“Terror, Compassion, and the Limits of Identification: Counter-Transference and Rites of Commemoration in Lebanon,” 94-112.

borneman@princeton.edu