Memory Matters

This course explores the growing field of memory studies and various modes of memory-forgetting in the post-Soviet society and culture. The "memory boom" in post-1991 Russia and Eastern Europe has significantly altered the way the post-socialist subjects remember, forget, or imagine their Soviet legacy. The course proposes a critical appraisal of memory studies as an opportunity for engaging in a genuine interdisciplinary endeavor. It starts by introducing students to the main theories and concepts of memory studies (collective memory, cultural memory, sites of memory, memory scape, counter-memory, mediated memory). In the second part of the course, we will study literary and cinematographic representations of memory and forgetting through the concepts of post-memory, second-generation memory, memory of eye-witnesses and perpetrators, memory of the displaced persons, and amnesia and memory loss . And finally, we will engage in comparing the social practices of selective remembering and forgetting of the memory of the WWII and Soviet legacy in present-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.