everything.study
21G.013

Out of Ground Zero: Catastrophe and Memory

Undergraduate · Historical course

Fall 2005

Within twenty-four hours of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 politicians, artists, and cultural critics had begun to ask how to memorialize the deaths of thousands of people. This question persists today, but it can also be countered with another: is building a monument the best way to commemorate that moment in history? What might other discourses, media, and art forms offer in such a project of collective memory? How can these cultural formations help us to assess the immediate reaction to the attack? To approach these issues, "Out of Ground Zero" looks back to earlier sites of catastrophe in Germany and Japan.

Readings

  • Agamben, Giorgio. Preface, and “The Witness.” In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive . New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002.
    Listed reading
  • Brockmann, Stephen. German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. ISBN: 1571132988.
    Listed reading
  • Caruth, Cathy. “Literature and the Enactment of Memory: Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon amour.” In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
    Listed reading
  • Halbwachs, Maurice. “Individual and Collective Memory,” and “Space and the Collective Memory.” In On Collective Memory. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
    Listed reading
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Age of Total War.” Chapter 1 in The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 . New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996.
    Listed reading
  • Huyssen, Andreas. “Twin Memories: After-Images of Nine/Eleven.” Grey Room 1, no. 7 (Spring 2002): 8-13.
    Listed reading
  • Levi, Primo. “Argon,” “Carbon,” and “Hydrogen.” In The Periodic Table . New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1995.
    Listed reading
  • Munroe, Alexandra. “Revolt of the Flesh: Ankoku Butoh and Obsessional Art.” Chapter 9 in Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky . New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994.
    Listed reading
  • Yoneyama, Lisa. “Phantasmatic Innocence,” “Tropes of the Nation, Peace, and Humanity,” “On the Politics of Historical Memory,” (Introduction), and “Memories in Ruins.” (Part 1, chapter 2). In Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Twentieth-Century Japan, the Emergence of a World Power, No 10). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
    Listed reading
  • Young, James. “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem and Mine.” The Public Historian 24, no. 4 (2002): 65-80.
    Listed reading
  • Boyer, Christine M. “Meditations on a Wounded Skyline and Its Stratigraphies of Pain.” Chapter 10 in After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City . Edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 0415934796.
    Listed reading
  • Hein, Carola. “Hiroshima: The atomic bomb and Kenzo Tange’s Hiroshima Peace Center.” In Out of Ground Zero: Case Studies in Urban Reinvention. Edited by Joan Ockman. New York, NY: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture Columbia University; Prestel, München, 2000, pp. 62-83. ISBN: 3791327909.
    Listed reading
  • Sebald, W. G. “Air War and Literature.” In On the Natural History of Destruction. New York, NY: Random House, 2003. ISBN: 0375504842.
    Listed reading
  • Ladd, Brian. “Nazi Berlin.” in The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, c1997. ISBN: 0226467619.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Capital of the New Germany.” In The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
    Listed reading
  • Lentricchia, Frank and Jody McAuliffe. “Groundzeroland.” In Crimes of Art and Terror . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN: 0226472051.
    Listed reading
  • David, Harvey. “Cracks in the Edifice of the Empire State.” In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City . Edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 0415934796.
    Listed reading
  • Wigley, Mark. “Insecurity by Design.” In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City. Edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 0415934796.
    Listed reading
  • Darnton, Eric. “The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism: Minoru Yamasaki, Mohammed Atta, and Our World Trade Center.” In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City. Edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 0415934796.
    Listed reading
  • Wallace, Mike. “New York, New Deal.” In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City . Edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 0415934796.
    Listed reading
  • Einstürzende Neubauten. Strategies against Architecture. Vol. I (Released in 1983), Vol. II (Released in 1991), and Vol. III (Released in 2001). Mute Records Ltd.
    Listed reading
  • Navel and Atomic Bomb . Directed by Eiko Hosoe, featuring Tatsumi Hijikata. 1960.
    Listed reading
  • Hiroshima, Mon Amour . Directed by Alain Resnais. 1959. (Language: French)
    Listed reading
  • Germany in Year Zero . Directed by Roberto Rossellini. Image Entertainment, 1947. (Language: Italian/German)
    Listed reading
  • 9/11 . Directed by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. 2002.
    Listed reading
  • Berlin Babylon . Directed by Hubertus Siegert and Ralph Stern. 2001.
    Listed reading
  • Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing about Literature . 4th ed. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1979. ISBN: 0321104765.
    Listed reading
  • Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia: Language, History, Theory . 3rd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 019513981X.
    Listed reading
Sources