COML102 - Narratives of Memory

For the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it." Across the last century-and-a-half, major books and films from the world over have thought about memory in all its dimensions. What does it mean to remember and narrate one's life in the context of family, of tradition, and community? How is the legacy of major traumatic events like the Holocaust and the 1947 partition shaped by traveling objects and people? How do memories mean different things as they intersect with emotions such as nostalgia or trauma, and when they belong to different communities of gender, race, nation, and religion? By thinking through a range of genres such as films, the novel, memoir, poetry, and song, this course will ask students to consider how our ways of writing and remembering create both memory and our sense of self. Reading work by the likes of Rigoberta Menchu, Julian Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov while watching canonical films such as Casablanca and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, students will be invited to remember and narrate their lived experiences, and to consider the significance of memory on their own terms.