Instructor
McCarthy

Examines personal and collective memory in a variety of cultural contexts and the strategies which film and literature use to represent it. We will also analyze the roles that truth-telling, trauma and national narratives play in memory’s construction. From the German context, we will look specifically at cultural and social memory in understanding Germany’s twentieth-century history. More generally, and in light of James Frey’s controversial autobiography, we will examine general assumptions around memory and the extent to which it can be accurately rendered.