Memory, Trauma, Genocide, Evil

Course Syllabus

Professors Richard and Carol Bernstein

Session 1 -- July 9: Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chapters 2, 3,4, Conclusion (PDF)
-- Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, “What Is Cultural Memory?” (PDF)
-- Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 68-80, 120-124, 161-176 (PDF)
-- William Hirst and David Manier, “Toward a Psychology of Collective Memory” in Memory (PDF)

Session 2 -- July 10: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 22-27, 77-100, 123-130 (PDF)
-- Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, pp. 3-69, 271-274, 289-30 (PDF)

Session 3 -- July 11: Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (PDF)
-- Dori Laub, Testimony, chapters 2 and 3, pp. 57-92 (PDF)
-- Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Unclaimed Experience, pp. 1-9 (PDF)
-- Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Part I, pp. 3-12; Part II, pp.151-157 (PDF)

Session 4 -- July 12: Aharon Appelfeld, “The Awakening,” in Holocaust Remembrance, pp. 149-152 (PDF)
-- Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Memory, and Transference,” in Holocaust Remembrance, pp. 252-263 (PDF)
-- Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (PDF)
-- Eric Santner, “ History Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander, pp. 143-154 (PDF)
-- Poems from Truth and Lamentations: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust (PDF)
-- Ida Fink, “A Second Scrap of Time” (PDF)
-- T. Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (PDF)

Session 5 -- July 14: Christopher Browning, “German Memory, Judicial Interrogation, and Historical Reconstruction” (PDF)
-- Omer Bartov, “Elusive Enemies” (PDF)
-- W.G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature,” pp. 3-25, 98-104 (PDF)

July 15: Trip to Auschwitz

Session 6 -- July 16: Memorials: Freud, “Screen Memories” (PDF)
-- Marita Sturken, “The Wall and the Screen Memory” from Tangled Memories (PDF)
-- Andreas Huyssen, Introduction to Present Pasts (PDF)
-- Geoffrey Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents” (PDF)

Session 7 -- July 17: Cambodia: Samantha Power, from A Problem from Hell, Introduction, Cambodia (PDF)
-- Amitav Ghosh, “Dancing in Cambodia” (PDF)

Session 8 -- July 19: Latin America: Jacopo Timerman, from Prisoner without a Name, Cell without
a Number (PDF)
-- Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, Chapter 1, pp. 19-62 (PDF)
-- Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, “You Are Here,” pp. 161-189 (PDF)
-- Andreas Huyssen, “Memory Sites in an Expanded Field” (PDF)

Session 9 -- July 20: Rwanda: Gerard Prunier, from The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (PDF)
-- George Packer, "Justice on a Hill," from The New Killing Fields (PDF)
-- Jean Hatzfeld, from Machete Season (PDF)

Session 10 -- July 22: Primo Levi, “The Gray Zone,” from The Drowned and the Saved (PDF)
-- Giorgio Agamben, from Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 41-66, 80-83 (PDF)
-- Jean Améry, “Torture,” from At the Mind’s Limits (PDF)
-- Maurice Blanchot, from The Writing of the Disaster, pp. 36-43, 50-58, 78-86, 99-103 (PDF)

Session 11 -- July 23: Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 437-459 (PDF)

Session 12 -- July 24: Hannah Arendt, from Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 112-150, 234-279 (PDF)