4:00-6:00P     T     BH221

Topic:  History and Memory in Europe and America
Above section reserved for majors only
Above section meets with HIST H620 and H645

The idea of memory has emerged as a subject of serious scholarship at
a time when the viability of nationalism and its attendant discipline
of history have encountered serious criticisms.  This colloquium
intends to discuss the literature on the problem of national memory in
nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and America.  Topically it
will look at the rise of national history in the nineteenth century
and the ideas, symbols, and commemorations that were deployed to
promote its acceptance.  The subject of war and remembering will
occupy considerable class attention.  The impact of the Civil War in
the United States, the Holocaust, and World Wars in Western and
Eastern Europe had crucial consequences for participating nations.
Wars raised questions about the promise of nationalisms for better
futures based upon reason and progress; they produced traumatic
memories of brutality and loss that prompted widespread cultural
debates about the very viability of earlier histories and memories
that had glossed over the violent potential of nations themselves.
Postwar discussions about the past were driven as much by victims of
brutality as much as they were by citizens dreaming of material
progress and equal rights.

The basic structure of national remembering was not only altered by
war but by the spread of mass culture.  Novels, films, museums and
other forms of mass entertainment began to express more discreet
versions of the past.  Individual and group memories began to claim
more of the cultural and political space previously dominated by
nations themselves.  The way this process differed between the
democratic and socialist states will be given special attention.
Eventually the cultural of memory became more diffuse throughout
Europe and America.  Discussion of the impact of mass culture on
remembering will be combined with analysis of the technologies of
remembering:  museums, novels, films, monuments, etc.  Books to be
read by everyone include:  Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy:
Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South; Maurice
Halbwachs, On Collective Memory; Michael Steinlauf, Bondage to the
Dead: Poland the Memory of the Holocaust; Marita Sturken, Tangled
Memories: Vietnam, The Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering;
Nine Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult
of World War II in Russia; and Jay Winters, Sites of Memory, Sites of
Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History.  A number of
novels and films will also be included for discussion.  Each student
will write a mid-term and final essay of 6-8 pages synthesizing the
literature discussed