Course Offerings in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies
The following is an incomplete list of courses that count for the Graduate Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. If you are teaching or taking a course that should be listed, please contact Michael Rothberg.
Fall 2010
JS 502: INTRODUCTION TO HOLOCAUST, GENOCIDE, AND MEMORY STUDIES, Michael Rothberg. Time TBA
(Description to Come)
Spring 2010
ENG 581: SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Michael Rothberg. W 3-5:20
TOPIC: Trauma, Memory, Justice
This course will consider three linked keywords of recent literary and cultural theory: trauma, memory, and justice. In the first section of the course, we will explore the emergence of trauma theory, an approach meant to shed light on the event and aftermath of extreme violence. Working from both classic texts such as Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and post-Freudian interventions by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra, and others, we will address the contributions a theory of trauma can make to understanding modern histories of violence. Because such a theory seeks to describe a form of violence that persists beyond an initial event—a “structure of experience” characterized by belatedness—memory becomes a central category in approaches to trauma and will constitute the second focus of our course. Trauma both troubles ordinary memory and seems to call for new forms of remembrance, testimony, and witness as part of strategies of working through and confronting violence. In taking up the paradoxical category of “traumatic memory,” we will draw on influential work on individual and collective memory by theorists such as Freud, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Andreas Huyssen, Marianne Hirsch, and Saidiya Hartman. Yet, as crucial as memory is in responding to trauma, remembrance alone cannot constitute an adequate response to histories of extreme violence. Such histories also raise questions about justice, that is, about what forms of social practice and organization can address and transform the conditions that have produced trauma in the past and continue to do so in the present. In this third section of the course, we will read theorists of justice such as Jean-François Lyotard, Nancy Fraser, and Adi Ophir and confront questions about commensurability, recognition, redistribution, and representation. Throughout the course, we will also take up feminist, Marxist, queer, postcolonial, and other critiques of the concepts of trauma and memory by scholars such as Alain Badiou, Lauren Berlant, Laura Brown, Wendy Brown, Frantz Fanon, Kerwin Lee Klein, Ruth Leys, David Lloyd, Peter Novick, and Walter Benn Michaels. Such critics raise questions such as the following: What are the political and conceptual limits of trauma as a category? How well does it translate beyond a Eurocentric horizon? Do discourses of trauma and memory always serve the interests of justice or can they turn into catalysts for revenge and further cycles of violence? What categories beyond trauma and memory might contribute to alternative conceptions of justice?
In seeking answers to these theoretical conundrums, we will also weave in readings of specific literary and cinematic examples that explore what Paul Gilroy has called the “underside” of modernity: colonialism, slavery, and genocide. These texts may be chosen from the following list: Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits; Octavia Butler, Kindred; J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace; Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit; Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory; Michael Haneke, Caché; Ghassan Kanafani, “Returning to Haifa”; Claude Lanzmann, Shoah; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound or Higher Ground; W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz; and Art Spiegelman, Maus.
Supplementary recommended texts that students might want to familiarize themselves with ahead of time include: Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question and Anne Whitehead, Memory. This course will count toward the Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies.
HIST 502C: PROBLEMS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY, Peter Fritzsche. M 3-4:50
TOPIC: Catastrophe and the Modern Imagination
In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore “catastrophe and the modern imagination,” pairing fiction with non-fiction and analyses of catastrophe with the politics of its representation. Topics will include Katrina, the extinction of the dinosaurs and global warming, millenialism, revolution, terror, colonialism, famine, the Great Depression, war and killing, the Holocaust, genocide, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and memory, truth, and reconciliation. Readings will include Dave Eggers, Zeitoun, Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Paul Martin’s Twilight of the Mammoths, Tom LaHaye’s Left Behind, Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate all the Brutes”, Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, Michael Taussig’s Law in a Lawless Land, Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famine, Paul Fussell’s, The Great War and Modern Memory, Hans Nossack’s The End, Lawrence Langer’s Holocaust Memories, Robert Eaglestone’s The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Dave Grossman, On Killing, Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers, Fiona Ross’s Bearing Witness, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent. Please read Eggers for the first day.
LA 390/590: LANDSCAPE, COMMEMORATION, AND TRAUMA: SLAVERY SITES, Rebecca Ginsburg. MW 2-3:50
Why do we commemorate the past? Are there instances when we would do better to forget? Can the physical form of a memorial support, or undermine, its healing functions? And how do the answers to these questions change when it comes to commemorating horrific historical episodes, such as slavery?
This seminar will be divided into three sections. In the first, we’ll acquaint ourselves with various theories of and approaches to commemoration. Next, we’ll learn more about commemoration within the special context of slavery, especially Atlantic slavery.
Finally, we’ll consider a real-life case, that of the island of Sao Tome, one of the key sites of the development of the Atlantic
slave system. What are the particular issues raised by commemorating slavery on the island and what might an appropriate monument to slavery there look like?
This seminar applies theory to practice in a real historical setting. While some students will take it in conjunction with a design studio, design expertise is not required, just an interest in thinking about the social impact and moral implications of built landscapes.
Fall 2009
ENG 563G: SEMINAR THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Cary Nelson. M 3-5:50
TOPIC: The Theory and Practice of Holocaust Poetry
In Survival in Auschwitz holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi decribes an indicative incident during his first days at the camp. Desperately thirsty, he reached out a window to grasp an icicle. A beefy guard knocked it away. “Warum?” Levi asked. The succinct answer carried a certain uncanny ethical and philosophical depth: “Hier ist kein warum.” Here there is no why. If the question could not be posed in the death camps, can it be posed in poetry instead? Can poetry put forth its humanity in the face of a world where all such values were extinguished?
In 1940 the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was drafted into a labor battalion along with thousands of his fellow Jews. As the war progressed and Hungary brought its policies into greater compliance with those of its German ally, these labor battalions, brutal from the outset, became increasingly lethal. Beaten and starved, the Jews were now randomly murdered. Radnóti nonetheless transformed the horror into poems and wrote them in a small notebook. On August 29, 1944, nearing the end, he wrote the first of four poems under the title “Razglednicas,” Serbo-Croatian for “picture postcards.” A month later he writes the last of the “Razglednicas” on the back of a cod-liver oil advertizing notice he found discarded. The poem predicts his death: “shot in the neck . . . blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.” On November 9th he met the fate he had anticipated, but nineteen months later, the war over, his body was distinterred and the blood stained poems recovered. Is it sufficient justification for poetry that his testimony now outlives his executioners?
There is no more severe challenge to the humane aspirations, social functions, and theoretical accounts of poetry than that posed by the holocaust. Leo Haber calls it “pale consolation, dear God of poetry, of justice, of mercy, / of explanations, for the murder of little children.” Adorno famously remarked that to write poetry after Auschwitz was obscene. Yet poetry was written both during the war and after, including anti-Semitic poems produced by the Nazis themselves. In that context we might conclude that the genre was so marked by its demonic uses that its myths of transcendence became a cruel joke. We will examine this whole history—poems written by wartime victims, witnesses, and perpetrators; poems written by later generations seeking to keep the historical memories alive and make the events more real. We will read poems from many different countries, using English language texts but comparing them to the original language texts whenever possible. In some cases multiple translations of individual poems exist. Again, we will compare them. Some translators feel one should find equivalents for Radnoti’s rhymes; others feel that is the worst choice possible.
Although studying holocaust poetry may seem a daunting way to spend a semester, the experience of discussing these poems in a group is actually tremendously restorative. Working through these powerful texts collaboratively, discussing what rhetorical strategies do and do not succeed, interrogating the relationship between the lyric and both history and contemporaneity, gives new importance to a collaborative model of criticism and to the help we can give one another.
Among the poets we will study in detail are Paul Celan, Jacob Glatstein, William Heyen, Dan Pagis, Radnóti, Charles Reznikoff, Nelly Sachs, W. D. Snodgrass, and Abraham Sutzkever. We will also read poems by Brian Daldorph, Jorie Graham, Anthony Hecht, Denise Levertov, Primo Levi, Czeslaw Milosz, János Pilinsky, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Hilda Schiff, Anne Sexton, and many others, among them the Yiddish poets Aaron Kramer has translated. For general background we’ll read War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust by Doris Bergen. In addition to a selection of poems, each week’s readings will include essays from The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg. Anthologies we will use include Marguerite Striar, ed. Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, Charles Fishman, ed. Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, Hilda Schiff, ed. Holocaust Poetry, and Aaron Kramer, ed., The Last Lullaby. You may want to get discounted copies of these books in advance from amazon.com or abebooks.com. We will conduct the class as a collective, collaborative project of interpretation and analysis. The seminar does not assume expertise on the holocaust, merely willingness to discuss the relevant issues.
Please email any questions about the course to Cary Nelson.
MDIA 590P: MOVING MEMORIES: HISTORY AND MEMORY STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION, Kent Ono. Th 3-5:50
The role of history and memory in communication studies is highly significant. What is remembered, how it is remembered, and what the effect of remembrance is are all questions central to communication studies. Yet, writing and teaching on the subject has been haphazard at best. The excitement around history and memory, and now forgetting studies, beginning in the 1990s continues on, but it is still relatively rare to see publications in communication, a field arguably closest to the daily mass production of cultural memory. This course takes the topic of history, memory, and forgetting seriously, first, by thinking through the significance of these concepts across a variety of fields and then by thinking specifically through the importance of history, memory, and forgetting within communication studies. Part of what we will seek to understand is how media and film participate in the construction of history and memory and how they participate in forgetting. What particular role do visual media play in the creation of what is known? And, how do our questions about remembrance help shape the way we see media, creating history and memory into the future? Download the syllabus here.
Please email any questions about the course to Kent Ono.