CPLT 3590/GETR 3590 – Memory Speaks – Lorna Martens

Memory is a crucial human faculty.  Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human.  Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self.  Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future.  Remembering has its delights.  Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate.  Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium.   Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control.  It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes.  Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive.  It is demonstrably suggestible.  It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike.

This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives).  We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras.  Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory.   Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well.

Two short papers, exam.