NEH Enduring Questions Course on "What Is Memory?"
FAIN: AQ-50660-12
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Martha Dana Rust (Project Director: September 2011 to March 2017)
The development of an undergraduate honors seminar on the question, What is memory?
Martha Rust, an associate professor of English with a specialty in medieval literature and a background in nursing, and Suzanne England, a professor of social work with an interest in gerontology, develop a course on memory as a source "from which we draw both in acting as morally astute agents in the present and in envisioning new possibilities for the future." In approaching the subject, the course addresses such subsidiary questions and issues as, Where does memory exist in the brain, and what are its connections with sensory organs? Why do our memories change, and how accurate are they? What is the connection between memory and the self-and with language and story-telling? Can a preoccupation with memories forestall beneficial growth and change? and What events are best forgotten and how do we go about forgetting them? The course is divided into six units, the first three on memory in its "untrained and personal states" and the last three on the "training of memory, its uses and abuses." The first unit approaches childhood memories through readings in Augustine's Confessions, Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The second unit, on the idea of memory, draws on David Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory; Sigmund Freud, "Screen Memories"; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Plato, Theaetetus; William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"; and W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. In the third section, on the science of memory, the class reads more from Kandel's book, studies Jamie Ward's The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, and views Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon. The fourth unit, on memory in art, draws on additional chapters from Augustine, Borges's "Funes the Memorious," Thomas Bradwardine's "On Acquiring a Trained Memory," and A. R. Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. The fifth section, on cultural memory, includes Italo Calvino's "World Memory," Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the final unit, on forgetting, the class utilizes Janna Quitney Anderson, "Does Google Make Us Stupid?"; Alice Munro, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"; and Sarah Polley's film version of Munro's story. Professors Rust and England draw on the materials in the course bibliography to grow intellectually in such areas as cultural memory studies and the practice of memory in a variety of time periods; in addition, Professor England benefits from Professor Rust's nursing background and knowledge of cognitive neuroscience and Professor Rust benefits from Professor England's scholarly expertise. The course includes a website and an electronic discussion board to foster intellectual community.
Associated Products
“‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory”
Author: Martha Rust
Author: Suzanne England
Abstract: “A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s “Mystory” mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories--ours and our students as well as those related by Nabokov--and to explore their tendencies to constellate around images, objects, and their metaphorical relations--the spiral, for instance. Following Ulmer, our Mystory is modeled after Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Like A Lover’s Discourse, it is based on a “tutor text”: A Lover’s Discourse’s tutor text is Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther; ours is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Like A Lover’s Discourse, our Mystory consists of a collection of “figures,” short open-ended compositions in which we write with and after Nabokov, weaving our responses to the autobiography with our own and each others' memories, including autobiographical and collective memories as well as memories of other texts. This “weaving” process is supported by our use of SCALAR (http://scalar.usc.edu/), a multi-modal web-authoring platform, as the environment for our collaborative work. Coupling the responsive Mystory mode of studying a memoir to the collaborative SCALAR writing environment facilitates students’ appreciation of the similarities between life writing and story writing, thereby also helping them to recognize the activity of remembering as itself a creative process.
Date: 09/04/2014
Conference Name: The Story of Memory: New Perspectives on the Relationship between Memory and Storytelling in the Twenty-First Century (sponsored by The Memory Network
Conference Session (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Conference Session
Author: Martha Rust and Suzanne England
Abstract: We proposed and had approved a session entitled "Teaching Memory Studies"
Excerpt from our session proposal:
“Negotiating Sites of Memory,” the presidential theme for the 2015 MLA convention together with the approval of an MLA Memory Studies forum in 2014 attest to an increasingly widespread application of the discipline of memory studies to the areas of scholarly endeavor the MLA supports, including the teaching of literature and writing. Previous MLA sessions related to teaching memory studies include “Teaching Life Writing Now” (presiding, Cassuto, 2011), and “Reading Memory: Approaches to Teaching the Memoir” (presiding, Donohue, 2015). Our panel will contribute to this growing conversation while also pushing the boundaries of memory studies pedagogy in literature courses beyond its close affiliation with memoir and literary criticism to attend to the cultural processes by which memories are shared. In the past several decades “cultural memory” has developed as a term to describe the ways societies remember their past using a variety of media (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). In this context, virtually any object of literary and cultural studies is a work of remembering, even as it at once evokes and takes root in readers’ and viewers own memories, a process that takes place on the collective as well as personal level. Together our papers demonstrate that by bringing the interdisciplinary tools of memory studies into the classroom, we are able to create an “official” disciplinarily structured space for exploring the contents and operations of memory both in an object of study and at the interface of object and viewer/readers, thus opening an awareness of memory as a life practice that is fluid, creative, and shared.
Date: 1/5/17
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Annual Convention
Teaching Memory Studies: Special Session at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Teaching Memory Studies: Special Session at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association
Author: Martha Rust and Suzanne England
Abstract: “Negotiating Sites of Memory,” the presidential theme for the 2015 MLA convention together with the approval of an MLA Memory Studies forum in 2014 attest to an increasingly widespread application of the discipline of memory studies to the areas of scholarly endeavor the MLA supports, including the teaching of literature and writing. Previous MLA sessions related to teaching memory studies include “Teaching Life Writing Now” (presiding, Cassuto, 2011), and “Reading Memory: Approaches to Teaching the Memoir” (presiding, Donohue, 2015). Our panel will contribute to this growing conversation while also pushing the boundaries of memory studies pedagogy in literature courses beyond its close affiliation with memoir and literary criticism to attend to the cultural processes by which memories are shared. In the past several decades “cultural memory” has developed as a term to describe the ways societies remember their past using a variety of media (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). In this context, virtually any object of literary and cultural studies is a work of remembering, even as it at once evokes and takes root in readers’ and viewers own memories, a process that takes place on the collective as well as personal level. Together our papers demonstrate that by bringing the interdisciplinary tools of memory studies into the classroom, we are able to create an “official” disciplinarily structured space for exploring the contents and operations of memory both in an object of study and at the interface of object and viewer/readers, thus opening an awareness of memory as a life practice that is fluid, creative, and shared.
Date: 01/05/2017
Primary URL:
https://apps.mla.org/program_details?prog_id=154&year=2017Primary URL Description: MLA Convention Program
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Annual Convention
“‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory.” (Book Section)Title: “‘The circle, uncoiled, unwound’: Following Memory’s Storyline with Mystory.”
Author: Suzanne England
Editor: Alex Wilkinson
Editor: Carlo Comanducci and
Abstract: ‘A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,’ writes Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s ‘mystory’ mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories--ours and our students as well as those related by Nabokov--and to explore their tendencies to constellate around images, objects, and their metaphorical relations--the spiral, for instance. Following Ulmer, our mystory is modeled after Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Like A Lover’s Discourse, it is based on a ‘tutor text’: A Lover’s Discourse’s tutor text is Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther; ours is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Like A Lover’s Discourse, our Mystory consists of a collection of ‘figures,’ short open-ended compositions in which we write with and after Nabokov, weaving our responses to the autobiography with our own and each other’s memories, including autobiographical and collective memories as well as memories of other texts. This ‘weaving’ process is supported by our use of Scalar (http://scalar.usc.edu/), a multi-modal web-authoring platform, as the environment for our collaborative work. Coupling the responsive mystory mode of studying a memoir to the collaborative SCALAR writing environment facilitates students’ appreciation of the similarities between life writing and story writing, thereby also helping them to recognize the activity of remembering as itself a creative process.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://brill-comAccess Model: subscription
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: Matters of Telling: The Impulse of the Story
ISBN: 9789004387683