This team-taught seminar will be a collaborative exploration of the dynamics of trauma, memory, cultural identity, and cultural analysis. Conceived less as an introduction to the burgeoning new field of trauma studies than as a critical instance of that trend, the course will take an independent look at some of the problems involved, from a historical and contemporary perspective. At the root of these is the problem of cultural formation, which we will be addressing through questions of cultural memory and identity, fantasies of collective belonging, re-imaginings of the past, fabricated memory, and so on. To what extent are such identities and imaginings formed around historical traumas, and to what extent are they reflections of traumatic elements in contemporary social and cultural formations? To what extent, in other words, is trauma inherited as a memory and to what extent is it a constitutive element in the contested (and sutured) nature of social formations generally?

Case studies will be drawn from texts in different genres, film, painting, photography, and architecture, focussing first on classical antiquity and then on post-Holocaust and post-communist Europe, in five segments: 1) Theoretical Introduction; 2) The Void of 'Classical' Greece: Longinus, Pausanias, Humboldt, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller; 3) Returning to the Camps: Alain Resnai's film, Night and Fog; P. Weiss, "Meine Ortschaft"/ "My Place"; B. Wilkomirski, Fragments; paintings and photographs by Anselm Kiefer and Dirk Reinartz; 4) Berlin: Void and Ruins: Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum; Daniel Eisenberg's film, Persistence; H. Müller, Germania Death in Berlin; 5) After the Collapse of Communism: Ceaucescu's Palace; Laura Mulvey's film, Disgraced Monuments, K. Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. Psychoanalysis and post-Marxist theory provide one set of tools for approaching the problems, and we will be building on these (Freud, Lacan, Laclau and Mouffe, Zizek, Baudrillard, B. Anderson, J. Young, C. Caruth, J. Assmann, LaCapra, Salecl, Santner).

Requirements: graduate standing; no language prerequisites. Work load: weekly reaction papers (posted to the web), one in-class presentation, and a final research paper (20 pp.). Although our focus will be largely European, the problems are not so restricted, and students of other national and methodological disciplines are encouraged to participate. Inquiries may be directed to hell@umich.edu or jport@umich.edu.

Wednesday 2:00-5:00 p.m.

2015 Tisch Hall

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