Total Recall: Creation and Undoing of Cultural Memory in the Arts
What actually do you remember? How much from literature, arts, and philosophy, constitute your wisdom, making you who you are? What are the mechanisms of turning the events—including the artworks—into memorable objects? And, in turn, what would make them forgettable, rejected, thrown into oblivion? In order to get these questions answered, numerous viewpoints and analytical tools should be employed, coming from physiology, cultural studies, art and music. The examples and philosophical concepts from Antiquity, mixed with the examples of cultural memory—such as J. S. Bach's compositions, or Holocaust memoriam—will be studied and cross-compared, aligning together within the metaphoric snapshot of human culture as we know (and remember) it. The origins and ongoing splashes of postmemory, disputed historic events (such as Russian Renaissance, Bolshevik revolution or today's media) will create a survey, open for everyone interested in music and philosophy. The course will engage students in academic writing, practical art work within Western trends and academia. These discussions will be entirely multidiscilplinary, implementing analytical tools from literature, music, and visual arts—thusly the course is taught by two teachers.