The seminar will examine the literary and artistic representations of memory in an effort to reveal how the act of remembering is determined by historical, cultural, political, and ideological perceptions of the past. We will study the relationship of memory to history, to commemoration, to confession, to autobiography, to narrative reconstruction, to testimony, to nostalgia, and to forgetting. The history of remembrance as well as the different forms of memory-private versus public, psychoanalytic versus collective, personal versus social, everyday versus historical-will be discussed. Since memory is a sign of and a surrogate for something that is absent or that has been lost, we will focus our attention on the memorializing aspects of memory in Renaissance theories concerning "the art of memory," in the development of mnemonic techniques, in the valorizing of certain rituals or protocols of remembrance, in the construction of monuments of commemoration, and in the private and public celebration of birthdays, anniversaries, bicentennials, and similar events. Other areas of concern will be: the role of gender in the reconstruction of the past, the formation of identity through personal and historical recollection, and the way images of the past determine perceptions of the present and the future. Readings from different centuries and by writers of different nationalities will be selected from among the following: Baudelaire, Freud, Kafka, Proust, Perec, Borges, Marshall, Woolf, Nabokov, Kundera, Bishop, Calvino, and writers of the Holocaust. Critical and theoretical readings will include texts by Bergson, Halbwachs, Yates, Benjamin, Nora, Blanchot, Barthes, Derrida, and Sacks. All readings in English. Format: seminar. Requirements: Active class participation, oral presentations, two 5- to 7-page papers, two hour exams. No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 20 (expected: 15).