| HISTORY AND MEMORY IN POSTWAR GERMANY, AUSTRIA and ISRAEL
INTNLREL 103/GERLIT 289
Professor Amir Eshel
This class offers a theoretically informed, comparative, and interdisciplinary
approach to the study of historical representation and memoralization
in a variety of countries. It presents different forms of historical representation
and memoralization in these countries and discusses the relationship between
history/memory and the formation of social, political, and cultural discourse.
The cases of postwar Germany, Austria, and Israel are exceptionally appropriate
for discussing these issues: Almost sixty years after the end of World
War II, the memory of the war and its representation are constitutive
elements of these countries' cultures and pervade their social and political
discourses. Reading central theoretical texts on historical representation
and on the construction of individual, collective, and cultural memory,
we will discuss the manners in which the events of the past are told,
remembered, and become objects of artistic representation. Presenting
historical, sociological, literary, visual, and cinematic materials, we
will ask how historiographic narratives as well as private and collective
memories relate to individual and communal identities.
Beyond the focus on specific case studies, the class wishes to encourage
students to think about the stakes of historical narratives-the ways,
in which the past is presented, remembered, used and misused. It aims
at sharpening attention not only to what is told about the past, but also
and perhaps primarily to how the past is presented and remembered. What
are the ideological, political, and aesthetic presuppositions of historiographies,
memories, and fictional accounts of the past? What are the implications
of different modes of historical representation for the social, political,
and cultural realms? How should various forms of representation be compared
and evaluated? How can we explain the so-called "memory boom" widely experienced
since the 1980s? How does this interest in history and memory relate to
the process of cultural globalization?
Class meeting time: Tuesdays and Thursdays
4:00-5:30 PM
Bldg. 160, Room 127. Wallenberg Hall |
