Approaches to the Past

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Level: 
Master's
Academic year: 
2009/2010
Semester: 
Fall
Start and end dates: 
6 Sep 2009
Co-hosting Unit(s) [if applicable]: 
Department of History
Stream/Track/Specialization/Core Area: 
Historical Studies: Theories, Methods, Skills, Historiography
CEU Instructor(s): 
Istvan Rev
Additional information: 
The class tries to demonstrate why the past is interesting in itself; how does the study of history contribute to a deeper understanding of the present; how and why problems of memory dominated research and discourse about history in the past decades; what is the price the profession and the public had to pay for this rather one-sided interest; what is the nature of an emerging new revisionism that tries to reestablish the distinction between “memory” and history.
Assessment : 
Besides texts, the class will analyze films and photographs as well. Members of the class will be assigned texts and problems, which are supposed to introduce in class. Students are expected to write a short research paper, based on reading and some archival work, by the end of the semester. Grades are calculated on the basis of both in-class work and the quality of the research paper.
Full description: 

Readings:

Carlo Ginzburg: Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm

Bernard Williams: What Was Wrong with Minos? and Historical Time: Representations, No. 74, Philosophies in Time (Spring, 2001), pp. 1-18.

Eric Auerbach: Odysseus’ Scar (in Auerbach, Mimesis).

Ernst Kantorowicz: The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton, 1997. pp.  7-60.

Louis Marin: The Portrait of the King, Minnesota, 1988. pp.

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Eric Breibart, documentary film: The Archive of Memory, 2003.

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Brown, L., & Green, C. (2002). Robert Smithson’s ghost in 1920s Hamburg: reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a non-site. Visual Resources: an International Journal of Documentation, 18(2), 167-181.

Carlo Ginzburg, Representation: The word, the Idea, the Thing. In: Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes. Nine Reflections on Distance. New York, Columbia University Press, 2OO1. pp. 63-78.

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Carlo Ginzburg: Ectasies: Deciphering the Withces’ Sabbath. pp. 296-315.

Michel Foucault: The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage, 1994. Pp. 303-386.

Reinhart Koselleck: Future’s Past, On the Semantics of Historical Time. Columbia, 2004. pp. 205-221.

Sergei Loznitsa: Blockade (experimental documentary film, 2005)

Ian Hacking, Memory Sciences, Memoro-politics, in: P Antze and M. Labek (eds.): Tense Past , Routlege, 1996, pp. 67-88

Jan Assmann, John Czaplicka: Collective Memory and Cultural Identity Collective Memory and Cultural Identity, in: New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring - Summer, 1995), pp. 125-133

Peter Forgacs: Danube Exodus (documentary film, 1998.)

Timothy Snyder: Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory.

In: J-W Muller (ed.) Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, Cambridge 2005 pp. 39- 58.

Timothy Snider: Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

In: The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56. No. 12 July, 16, 2009

(both at: http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/snyder.html)