090089 VO Trauma, Oblivion, Memory: Theory and Case Studies (2023S)

Preoccupation with memory and the past has taken on such dimensions during the last decades that scholars talk of a “memory boom” in literary and cultural studies. This course will guide students through this theoretical discourse on memory and will try to account for its current flourishing. We will draw on thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, G.W.F. Hegel, Marianne Hirsch, Pierre Nora, Aby Warburg, and discuss notions that include “afterlife”, collective and cultural memory, forgetting, lieux de mémoire, materiality and memory, tradition, post-memory, hauntology. Our special emphasis will be on memory and trauma, either individual or collective, which we will place in the psychoanalytic theoretical frame that emphasizes trauma’s inherent links to forgetfulness, latency, belatedness. We will also look at literary representations of trauma, drawing in the discussion examples of Modern Greek literature in a comparative frame. Traumatic accounts of the Asia Minor Disaster (1922) and the Greek civil war (1946-1949) in both poetry and prose will be brought in the theoretical perspective outlined throughout the course.
Teaching method combines lecture and discussion with the students. All texts we will discuss will be uploaded on the eclass in advance of our meetings.