Narrative and Memory

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will, in part, focus on honing your own critical reading and writing skills and approaches. We will be reading a series of texts — memoirs and novels — which have in common a concern with the nature of memory (often of traumatic memory) and the ways in which language can retrieve, accommodate, memorialize, and respond to the past. One of the themes that will emerge repeatedly is the instability of memory, as well as an emphasis on the uneasy connections and differences between fiction and memoir. The following are the texts to be covered in depth: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved; Bernard Schlink, The Reader; Neil Jordan, Shade; Pat McCabe, The Butcher Boy; Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark; Toni Morrison, Beloved. These main texts will be accompanied by a number of related articles, available in a course pack. I may add additional readings if I think it necessary. You will see that most of these articles concern the first two and the last of our texts. This is in part because there is not a lot of good secondary material on the Irish books we will be studying. You will also find, as you read the essays, that there is much in them that resonates with all of our texts. Please take the time to read carefully all of this material, as we progress; I will be discussing the articles with you in class. There will also be screenings of four films: extracts from Claude Lanzmann's masterpiece Shoah; The Gray Zone; The Butcher Boy; and After ‘68.