106-127 Contemporary Culture: Memory & Trauma

Availability

Credit Points

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually admission to fourth year Honours see Honours entry

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

The overarching aim of this subject is to explore a theoretical history of remembrance in contemporary culture. We will begin by considering the massive transformations in cultural memory brought about by modernity. From this starting point we will consider the trajectories of cultural memory from Freud's curative hypotheses to the dominance of amnesia and trauma as tropes of memory in contemporary culture. Students will be expected to read and explore both theoretical accounts of contemporary cultural memory and to produce specific studies of the ways in which mechanical reproduction, testimony, the bureaucratic and state archive, film, memory monuments, museums, the maintenance and transformation of communities and tradition, digital technologies and other cultural forms and institutions have formed and continue to form transformed contemporary cultures of remembrance.

Assessment

Written work totalling 5000 words.

Prescribed Texts

A subject reader will be available.