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Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
NYU Steinhardt
Cultural Memory
MCC-UE 1413
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course examines how cultural memory is enacted through visual culture in a
comparative global context. It looks at the rise of a memory culture over the last few
decades, in particular in the United States, Europe and Latin America, and how this
engagement with memory in memorials, artistic projects, design and architectures
demonstrates how the politics of memory can reveal aspects of nationalism and national
identity, ethnic conflict and strife, the legacies of state terrorism, and the deployment of
memory as a means for further continued conflict.
COURSE SUMMARY
Our focus will be primarily on a comparison of the US context with Germany, Argentina,
Chile, and Latin American contexts, with a particular focus on how artists, designers, and
architects have engaged with cultural memory in art and architecture.
We will be looking at memorials, museums, artistic projects, design, and architecture as
central to how cultural memory is shaped. We will situate these projects in relation to the
memory industry and global consumer economy, through which cultural memory is
packaged, branded, and consumed. These intersections—memory, visual culture,
consumerism, nationalism, and globalization—will frame our inquiries.
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
--Define cultural memory and visual culture, and their importance as fields of study.
--Narrate the politics of memory, and how cultural engagements with memory reveal
aspects of nationalism, national identity, empire, and political movements.
--Identify the engagement of artists, designers, and architects with questions of cultural
memory.
--Analyze the aesthetics of memory and how design forms create particular kinds of
cultural meaning.
--Analyze how urban settings are reconstructed, redesigned, and remade, and how this
relates to changing social and political meanings.
--Evaluate the consequences of various memory practices on a society’s coherence and
social identity.
--Evaluate how tourism and consumerism construct cultural memory.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Students are required to attend all classes, complete the readings for each class session,
and complete all assignments. If you miss more than 4 classes without a reasonable
excuse, your grade will be lowered.
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You should make an effort to meet with me in person at some point in the semester. I am
available for consultation via e-mail, in office hours, and by appointment.
ASSIGNMENTS:
There are 2 short papers (5 pages each), a class presentation, and a research
paper/project. The short papers will each be an analysis of a memorial site, exhibition,
art work, or photograph, etc. Students will be expected to submit proposals for their final
papers and to engage in a deep way with the topics of the course in their final paper. The
final paper will be 10-12 pages.
These assignments will be evaluated with the following value:
Short Papers, 20% each
Class presentation and general participation: 20%
Final Research Paper: 40%
Evaluation Rubric
A= Excellent
This work is comprehensive and detailed, integrating themes and concepts from
discussions, lectures and readings. Writing is clear, analytical and organized. Arguments
offer specific examples and concisely evaluate evidence. Students who earn this grade
are prepared for class, synthesize course materials and contribute insightfully.
B=Good
This work is complete and accurate, offering insights at general level of understanding.
Writing is clear, uses examples properly and tends toward broad analysis. Classroom
participation is consistent and thoughtful.
C=Average
This work is correct but is largely descriptive, lacking analysis. Writing is vague and at
times tangential. Arguments are unorganized, without specific examples or analysis.
Classroom participation is inarticulate.
D= Unsatisfactory
This work is incomplete, and evidences little understanding of the readings or
discussions. Arguments demonstrate inattention to detail, misunderstand course material
and overlook significant themes. Classroom participation is spotty, unprepared and off
topic.
F=Failed
This grade indicates a failure to participate and/or incomplete assignments
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ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
Academic integrity is the guiding principle for all that you do, from taking exams, making
oral presentations to writing term papers. It requires that you recognize and acknowledge
information derived from others, and take credit only for ideas and work that are yours.
You violate the principle of academic integrity when you cheat on an exam, submit the
same work for two different courses without prior permission from your professors,
receive help on a take-home examination that calls for independent work, or plagiarize.
When taking this class, you enter into a contract that states that all the work you are
turning in has been your own and no one else’s, and that you have not turned in any work
for which you have received credit in another class, and that you have properly cited
other people’s work and ideas. Do not take this policy lightly! Violations of this policy will
result in a failing grade in the course. If you have questions about these policies, or
proper citation of scholarship, please come speak with me in person. (see
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/policies/academic_integrity)
STUDENT RESOURCES
• Henry and Lucy Moses Center for students with disabilities, 726 Broadway, 2nd
floor (http://www.nyu.edu/csd/)
• Writing Center: 269 Mercer Street, Room 233. Schedule an appointment online at
www.rich15.com/nyu/ or just walk-in.
WEEKLY SCHEDULE
Week 1:
—Introduction
—What is Visual Culture?
Reading:
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Critical Visual Studies”
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking, Introduction
Week 2:
—Concepts of Memory
Reading:
Maurice Halbwachs, Collective Memory (excerpt)
Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad”
—Cultural Memory
Reading:
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories, Introduction
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Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History” (excerpt)
Paper 1 assignment given.
Week 3:
—The Modern City
Reading:
Practices of Looking, pp. 93-104
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood (excerpt)
— The City as Memory
Reading:
Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory (excerpt)
Marc Treib, Spatial Recall (select essays)
Week 4:
— Memory and Nationalism
Reading:
Benedict Anderson, "Imagined Communities”
Jan Assman, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”
— Memorials: Traditions and Meanings
Reading:
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania
Paper 1 due.
Week 5:
— Memorials and Counter-memorials
Reading:
Marita Sturken, “The Wall and the Screen Memory”
Paper 2 assignment given.
— Monuments and Counter-monuments
Reading:
James Young, “Memory, Countermemory and the End of the Monument”
James Young, “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem”
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Week 6:
— Memorial Museums
Reading:
Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin”
Harvey Molotch, “How the 9/11 Museum Gets Us”
— Remembering 9/11
Reading:
Marita Sturken, Tourists of History, Chapter 4
David Simpson, 9/11 (excerpt)
Week 7:
— Field trip to 9/11 Memorial and Museum
Reading:
General reviews of museum, TBD
Paper 2 due.
— Discussion and Reassessment
SPRING BREAK
Week 8:
— Architectures of Memory
Reading:
Mark Treib, Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape excerpts
— Architectures of Grief
Reading:
Marita Sturken, Tourists of History, Chapter 5
Week 9:
— The Photograph as Memory
Reading:
Geoffrey Batchen, “Forget Me Not” (excerpt)
Marita Sturken, “The Camera Image and National Meanings”
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— Family Pictures
Reading:
Leo Spitzer, “The Album and the Crossing”
Marcelo Brodsky, Buena Memoria
Final Paper Proposals Due
Week 10:
— Postmemory
Reading:
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, Introduction
— Postmemory and Graphic Novels
Reading:
Art Spiegelman, Maus (excerpt)
Andreas Huyssen, “Of Mice and Mimesis”
Week 11:
— Performing Memory/Remembrance
Reading:
Diana Taylor, “Trauma as Durational Performance
— Disappearance/Absence: Latin American contexts
Reading:
Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration (excerpt)
Week 12:
— Visuality and Power
Reading:
Nicholas Mizoeff, The Right to Look, Introduction
— Rethinking Memory in a Comparative Frame
Reading:
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (excerpt)
Week 13:
—Tourism
Reading:
Dean McCannell, The Tourist excerpts
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Destination Culture”
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— Memory Tourism
Reading:
Brigitte Sion, Balancing Memory, Architecture and Tourism, excerpt
Week 14:
— Kitsch, Checkpoint Charlie, and the 9/11 Gift Shop: The Problems of Memory
Reading:
Marita Sturken, Tourists of History, excerpt
—Conclusion
Final Papers due XXXX
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Additional Readings for Reference
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books,
2008.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London:
Verso, 2003.
Clark, Laurie Beth. “Placed and Displaced: Trauma Memorials.” In Performance and
Place, edited by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006,
129-38.
Colomb, Claire. Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban
Reinvention Post-1989. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Desmond, Jane. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display From Waikiki to Sea World.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of
Chicago, 2010.
Feldman, Allen. “Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma- Aesthetic.
”Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 163-202.
Foote, Kenneth E. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and
Tragedy. Revised and Updated. Austin: University of Texas Press, [1997] 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. “Screen memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III. London: Hogarth Press, 1899,
301-22..
_______. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII. Translated by
James Strachey. London: Hogarth, [1914] 1958, 145-56.
Goldberger, Paul. “Requiem: Memorializing Terrorism’s Victims in Oklahoma.” New
Yorker. January 14, 2002, 90.
___________. Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New
York. New York: Random House, 2004.
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Gomez-Barris, Macarena. Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in
Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Halbwachs, Maurice . On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
___________. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the
Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in
Jewish Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
____________. “On Class Photos.” Nomadikon.net Accessed February 10, 2013.
http://www.nomadikon.net/contentitem.aspx?ci=162
Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York:
Routledge, 1995.
_____________. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory.
Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994.
Isenberg, Noah. “Reading ‘Between the Lines’: Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum
and the Shattered Symbiosis.” In Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish
Symbiosis, 1945-2000, edited by Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes. New York: Palgrave,
2002), 155-79.
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Trans. Judy Rein and
Marcial Godoy-Anativia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and
Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban
Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press,
2004.
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Laub, Dori. “On Holocaust Testimony and its ‘Reception’ within its Own Frame, as a
Process in its Own Right.” In History and Memory 21.1 (Spring/Summer 2009): 12750.
Laub, Dori and Shoshana Felman. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Libeskind, Daniel. Jewish Museum Berlin. Berlin: G&B Arts International, 1999.
Linenthal, Edward T. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991.
__________. The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
__________. “‘The Predicament of Aftermath’: Oklahoma City and September 11.” In
The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster, edited by Lawrence J.
Vale and Thomas J. Campanella. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 55-74.
Mitchell, W.J.T. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” In The Visual Culture
Reader. Edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002. 83-101.
__________. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2005.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999 [1976].
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2011.
_____________. An Introduction to Visual Culture. Second Edition. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.”
Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7- 25.
Ockman, Joan, ed. Out of Ground Zero: Case Studies in Urban Reinvention.
Munich and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2002.
Olick, Jeffrey K. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical
Responsibility. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Radstone, Susannah and Bill Schwarz, eds. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.
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Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age
of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Schwartz, Vanessa and Jeannene Przyblyski, eds. The Nineteenth-Century Visual
Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006.
Sion, Brigitte. Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires: Balancing Memory,
Architecture, and Tourism. New York: Lexington, 2014.
Sorkin, Michael. Starting From Zero: Reconstructing Downtown New York. New York:
Routledge, 2003.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1996.
__________. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the
Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
_________. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma
City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual
Culture. Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Taylor, Frederick. The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989. New York, Farrar
Strauss Giroux, 2008.
Till, Karen. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005.
Treib, Mark, ed. Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Art, Literature, and
Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the
Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Young, James. E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
_____________. At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary
Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s
Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
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