Communication and Cultural Memory SPC 5930—Spring 2007 Wednesdays 6:00-8:50

— Instructor — Michael LeVan CIS 3033 | T 10-11; W 4-5; & by appointment 974.0788 | mlevan@cas.usf.edu

— Course Description — This course explores the constitution of memory as a cultural phenomenon both in and for communication. Although memory (especially that of trauma) can be deeply personal, we will direct our attention in this course to its public expression, cultural articulations, and rhetorical uses. Our readings and discussions of cultural memory will cluster around three basic themes: memory as experience, memory as response, and memory as medium. We will quickly find these themes entwined with each other—saturating texts, places, and identities. In addition to plumbing some of the cultural depths/surfaces of memory practices, we will consider the central role of forgetting in the memory industries of our present era.

— Readings — the following books are available at the university bookstore:

Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000/1987. Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambidge UP, 2003. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Markovitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Till, Karen E. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Additional essays will be made available; these are marked (BB) on the reading schedule.

— Requirements — Reading & Participating: Duh. This is the heart of graduate education; what separates this level from earlier ones is having a common set of readings and a common discussion experience to spark debates and research ideas and argument strategies and bitch sessions. You must attend, of course, to participate. Weekly précis: One or two members of class will be responsible for writing and presenting a précis of the previous week’s meeting. The précis is a summary of the previous week’s class, in which you distill and isolate the basic arguments, questions, and ideas covered in the class meeting. This is not a word-by-word record of our conversation, but a synopsis of what we discussed. During your week you should take careful notes. Your précis should be 1-2 single-spaced pages. You should send me a draft of your précis via email the weekend before it is due. At the start of class, you will present a brief (5 minute) oral summary of the précis contents. At the end of the semester, the collection of précis should be a very good record of what transpired, at least content-wise, in this course. Exploratory essay: By January 31st, turn in a short 3-5 page essay that addresses your “hopes for memory.” Basically, this essay gives you a chance to speculate on the nature of memory, to consider the usefulness of memory as a topic of study in communication, and to consider how the study of cultural/collective/public memory might influence and aid your work. You should also indicate an idea or two you have brewing regarding your final paper project. Final project & presentation: a major research paper (20-25 pages) or other project engaging cultural memory to be presented at the end of the semester in a conference-like setting (i.e., panels of presenters followed by questions and discussion). We will schedule these presentations early in the semester and hold the “symposium” on April 25th and May 2nd.

— Class Schedule — January 10 Recommended: Aristotle, “On Memory and Reminiscence” (BB) January 17 Required: Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (parts I & II) Recommended: Merleau-Ponty, Preface to Phenomenology of Perception (BB)

Langsdorf, “Why Phenomenology in Communication Research?” (BB) Steinbock, “Back to the Things Themselves: Introduction” (BB)

January 24 Required: Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (parts III & IV) Recommended: Casey, “Sym-Phenomenologizing: Talking Shop” (BB) Hoogestraat, “Memory: The Lost Canon?” (BB) January 31 Required: Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (37-119) Recommended: Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies” (BB)

Blair, “Communication as Collective Memory” (BB) Due: Exploratory essay due by this day February 7 Required: Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (120-235) Recommended: Zerubavel, “The Social Structure of Memory” & ”The Social Shape of the Past” (BB—one file) Spillman, “When Do Collective Memories Last?” (BB) February 14 Required: Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington” (BB) Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in WWII” (BB) Morris, “My Old Kentucky Homo: Lincoln and the Politics of Queer Public Memory” (BB) Vivian, “Jefferson’s Other” (BB) February 21 Required: Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (chapters 1-3) Recommended: Olick, “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures” (BB)

Biesecker, “Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century” (BB)

Haskins, “’Put Your Stamp on History’: The USPS Commemorative Program Celebrate the Century and Postmodern Collective Memory” (BB)

West, “Selling Canada to Canadians: Collective Memory, National Identity, and Popular Culture” (BB)

February 28 Required: Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (chapters 4-6) Recommended: Johnson, “Mapping Monuments: The Shaping of Public Space and Cultural Identities” (BB)

Whites, “You Can’t Change History by Moving a Rock: Gender, Race, and the Cultural Politics or Confederate Memorialization” (BB)

March 7 Required: Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (pp. 1-119) Recommended: Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins” (BB) March 21 Required: Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (121-228) Recommended: Cox & Holmes, “Loss, Healing, and the Power of Place” (BB)

Jorgenson-Earp & Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief: The Construction of Shrines at Sites of Public Tragedy” (BB)

March 28 Required: Toop, “Space and Memory” (BB)

Sturken, “The Space of Electronic Time” (BB) Vivian, “‘A Timeless Now’: Memory and Repetition” (BB) Katriel & Farrell, “Scrapbooks as Cultural Texts: An American Art of Memory” (BB)

Recommended: van Dijck, “Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory” (BB) DeChaine, “Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience” (BB)

April 4 Required: Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching Recommended: Owen, “Memory, War and American Identity: Saving Private Ryan as Cinematic Jeremiad” (BB)

Hasian, “Nostalgic Longings, Memories of the ‘Good War,’ and Cinematic Representations in Saving Private Ryan” (BB)

Barnhurst & Wartella, “Young Citizens, American TV Newscasts and the Collective Memory” (BB)

April 11 Required: Bacon, “Reading the Reparations Debate” (BB)

Mitchell, “Narrative, Memory, Slavery” (BB) Clastres, “Of Torture in Primitive Societies” (BB) Appadurai, “Consumption, Duration, History” (BB)

Horton & Kardux, “Slavery and Public Memory in the United States and the Netherlands” (BB) Recommended: Hasian & Carlson, “Revisionism and Collective Memory: The Struggle for Meaning in the Amistad Affair” Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others” (BB) April 18 Required: Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration Recommended: Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2002”

Huyssen, “Introduction,” “Present Pasts,” & “Twin Memories: Afterimages of 9/11” (BB—one file) Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory” (BB)

April 25 Due: Presentations May 2 Due: Presentations & Final papers

A few books for further reading: Agacinski, Sylviane. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. Trans. Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. (philosophy of time, images, and politics) Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: UP of New England, 1999. (museums, narratives, nostalgia, trauma) Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. (nostalgia, Europe, urban studies, literary studies). Fritsch, Matthias. The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. (philosophy, capitalism, utopia) Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. (trauma, Europe, place, urban studies). Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995. (Germany, media, culture, criticism) LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. (trauma, historiography) Loraux, Nicole. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Trans. Corinne Pache with Jeff Fort. New York: Zone, 2006. (the Ancients, political theory, democracy). Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History. London: Verso, 2005. (media studies, Asian studies). Phillips, Kendall R., ed. Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004. (rhetoric). Toop, David. Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004. (music, culture, space, sound).