Programma del corso
1. Memory as a leading concept for cultural studies
• What is the background of the memory discourse and the ongoing memory boom?
• Memory research as an interdisciplinary project.
• Distinguishing different ‘memory systems’ (episodic, semantic, procedural).
2. Interdependence between individual and social memory
• According to the French patron of the memory discourse, Maurice Halbwachs, there is no purely individual memory, a statement which is of course contested by writers such as Proust.
• The difference between visual and verbal memory, as well as between internalized or embodied and externalized or disembodied forms of memory (writing, photography, film, video).
3. Political memory
• Uses and abuses of the past by top-down forms of monumentalization and commemoration.
• The relationship between memory and historical discourse.
4. Cultural Memory
• Various memory systems on the cultural level: active and archival memory.
• Canonization as a cultural practice and its contestations in a post-colonial and globalizing world.
• Cultural memory in mass media society.
5. Trauma, Literature and the Ethics of Memory
• Theory of trauma, traumatic sites, intergenerational transfer of trauma, forms of trauma in literature, problem of the ethics of memory.