FYS: "Did You Forget Something?" - Exploring Memory and Forgetting

3 Credits.

How do we remember, and what do we forget? This interdisciplinary course explores acts of memory and forgetting across individual, collective, and cultural contexts. We will investigate questions such as: What gets remembered in official narratives and personal life stories, and what is forgotten or suppressed? How do communities selectively construct collective memories through monuments, museums, and commemorative practices? How do individuals negotiate memory and forgetting in their own lives? How do literature and film represent forgetting, erasure, and amnesia at both personal and collective levels? What role does nostalgia play in shaping how we remember the past? Drawing on memory studies, cultural theory, political thought, and neuroscience, we will examine how memory and forgetting define our present. Students will engage with sites of memory firsthand through a museum visit and exploration of commemorative spaces across Baltimore. Texts include Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter, Anne Berest's The Postcard, short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Oliver Sacks's essays on memory and neurology, and the films Goodbye Lenin and Ararat.