Time and Memory Research Workshops – Spring Semester 2010

Dr. Martin Hägglund (Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University)

Lecture:
Tuesday April 6th, 12:30-3:00 pm, Department of Comparative Literature, Clemens Hall 640
“Reading Proust: On Time, Memory, and Desire”

Abstract:
This paper offers a reassessment of Marcel Proust’s famous notion of involuntary memory. The guiding question is why the experience of involuntary memory is of such importance for the aesthetic and metaphysical vision of In Search of Lost Time. The established answer in Proust scholarship is that involuntary memory reveals a timeless essence. In contrast, I argue that involuntary memory does not transcend but rather intensifies the experience of temporal finitude. At the heart of involuntary memory there is not a timeless essence but what Proust describes as the “painful synthesis of survival and extinction.” This painful synthesis is revealed in the contrast between the memory that still survives and the past that already is extinguished. While involuntary memory recalls a certain life in vivid detail, it also recalls that the same life is irredeemably lost. By paying close attention to Proust’s articulation of temporal experience, I show why such a synthesis of survival and extinction is the very form of time. If nothing were extinguished nothing would pass away and if nothing survived nothing would relate the past to the future. Following this perspective, I argue for a new understanding of both Proust’s aesthetics and his perennial themes of time, memory, and desire.

Workshop:
Wednesday, April 7, 4-6 pm, Department of Anthropology, MFAC 355

“The Arche-Materiality of Time”

Readings:
M. Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, 2008.

M. Hägglund, Chronolibidinal Reading: Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis, In: New Centennial Review 9:1, pp. 1-43, 2009.

M. Hägglund, The Challenge of Radical Atheism: A Response. In: New Centennial Review 9:1, pp. 227-252, 2009.

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Professor Harriet I. Flower (Department of Classics, Princeton University)

“Time and Memory: The Burial Practices of the Licinii in Rome”

Wednesday, April 14, 4-6 pm in the Goetz Library, Department of Classics

Abstract:

My subject is the material from three underground chambers, excavated in Rome in 1884-1885 and now known as the "Tomb of the Licinii". Three distinct types of ancient evidence were discovered there: inscribed funerary altars; marble portraits of men, women and children; and sculpted sarcophagi with mythological scenes. My main interest is in the altars and their inscriptions, which will be presented in their archaeological and historical context. Many of the individuals named in these texts, as well as some of their relatives who were apparently not buried here, were the subject of notoriety and scandal during their lifetimes and at the times of their deaths. These men were amongst the most well known traitors and pretenders to imperial power in the first century AD. My paper will investigate how their remains were preserved in a hidden burial chamber by later generations of their family. This tomb is the subject of heated scholarly debate at the moment, partly owing to the (re)discovery of a series of nineteenth century documents relating to their original hasty excavation. This tomb provides a fascinating case study of how a family that had moved beyond its turbulent political past chose both to remember and to obscure a notorious history of political opposition and official disgrace.

Readings: 

F. Van Keuren (2003) "Unpublished documents shed new light on the Licinian Tomb, discovered in 1884-1885, Rome." Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 48:53-139

P. Kragelund, M. Moltesen, J. Stubbe Østergaard, 2003. The Licinian Tomb: Fact or Fiction? Copenhagen.

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Professor Alison Landsberg (Film and Media Studies, George Mason University)

“Waking the Deadwood of History: Listening, Language and the ‘Aural Visceral’”

Friday, April 23, 3-5 pm in Clemens 120 I, Department of American Studies

Abstract:

The role of sound in filmic and televisual historical representations has been underexamined, yet sound can function in powerful ways to produce specific forms of knowledge about the past.  In particular, a film or show can use dialogue and other human sounds to move viewers between spectatorial identification and alienation. In other words, sound can be deployed to maintain a sense of distance and difference as a structuring principle even as viewers are invited to have an investment in the past.  Viewers can come to feel connected to the past without losing a sense of their inevitably fixed position in the present. This essay examines the case of the HBO dramatic series Deadwood to illustrate the particular ways in which sound and dialogue structure the conditions of audience engagement and thereby make possible the acquisition of particular kinds of knowledge about the past. 

Readings: 

A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture. In: Paul Grainge (ed.), Film and Popular Memory, 2003, 144-162.

A. Landsberg, Memory, Modernity, Mass Culture, 1-24 and Chapter 4, America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: The Object of Remembering, 111-140.