AMST 302(S) Junior Seminar in American Studies: Technologies of Memory
What are the methodologies and theoretical assumptions underlying the practice of American Studies? Taking up a range of thematically related texts, events, and institutions, this course will provide majors with the chance to engage different approaches that have distinguished the field of American Studies. This year the topic is cultural memory. America has been described as a culture of amnesia, an always-emerging nation founded in opposition to the recuperation or veneration of the past. Throughout its history, however, its peoples have memorialized their experience through objects, images, representations, and social acts. These forms are technologies of memory, the means by which a culture collectively remembers itself and thus makes itself meaningful. What is worth remembering? What must be forgotten? What are the political stakes in our acts of historical transmission and repression? Moving from nineteenth-century fictions of Puritanism and Civil War photography to contemporary phenomena like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, we study sites of cultural recollection including witnessing, nostalgia, genealogy, revisionism, reenactment, brainwashing, and documentary recording. Prerequisite: American Studies 201.