Seminar /CfP - The Story of Memory: Remembering, Forgetting, and Unreliable Narrators, 2017, USA

As Elizabeth Loftus puts it, memory is like a Wikipedia page—true memories can be obliterated and false ones added, either by ourselves or by others. Theories in memory studies (“flashbulb memory,"“photographic memory,"“verbal overshadowing,”and more recently, Julia Shaw’s study on “memory hacker” and “memory illusion”) facilitate our exploration on traumatic memory, false memory, collective memory, and amnesia in contemporary representation. This seminar will focus on the following questions: What is the relationship between memory and forgetting? What kind of memory is legitimate? Is it possible to write against memory? How do our memories fill in missing details? How do writing, verbal representation, and technologies influence our ways of remembering? How does the way memory functions in the 21^st century change the way we think about ourselves and the way we represent our past?

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
memory and forgetting
unreliable narrator
memory and metamodernism
memory illusion
nostalgia and anachronism
postmemory, rememory
trauma, melancholy, and other backward affects
images and memory
collective memory
memory in the digital age
gendered memory
recollection, re-enactment