21F.013 Out of Ground Zero: Catastrophe and Memory, Fall 2002
Name
21F-013Fall-2002/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-013Out-of-Ground-Zero--Catastrophe-and-MemoryFall2002/CourseHome/index.htm
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15.06 KB
Format
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Checksum (MD5)
a95b9905818fc3b8380dc3b67bb8b8a2
Author(s)
Scribner, Charity
Alternative Title
Out of Ground Zero: Catastrophe and Memory
Date Issued
December 2002
Abstract
Subject offers a cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective on the problems of catastrophe and the process of memorializing. It asks what media and various art forms can offer to the project of collective memory. It engages key texts on the notion of "ground zero" in the urban cultures of Europe and Japan, and draws from them a provisional theoretical framework with which to analyze the public responses to the World Trade Center attacks. Topics covered include: The Enola Gay controversy, architectural sites at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the aesthetic and iconographic dimensions of the events of September 11, and the media influence on our perception of global commerce, transportation systems, surveillance, non-Western cultures and oppositional political formations. Authors include Robert Musil, Maurice Halbwachs, Shusaku Arakawa, Michael Hogan, Ariella Azoulay, Chomsky, Freud, and Edward Said. Taught in English. From the course home page: Course Description Within twenty-four hours of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 politicians, artists, and cultural critics had begun to ask how to memorialize the deaths of thousands of people. This question persists today, but it can also be countered with another: is building a monument the best way to commemorate that moment in history? What might other discourses, media, and art forms offer in such a project of collective memory? How can these cultural formations help us to assess the immediate reaction to the attack? To approach these issues, "Out of Ground Zero" looks back to earlier sites of catastrophe in Germany and Japan.
Subjects
World Trade Center
September 11
memorial
discourse
media
art
collective memory
Germany
Japan
global commerce
transportation
systems
surveillance
non-Western cultures
oppositional political formations
Robert Musil
Maurice Halbwachs
Shusaku Arakawa
Michael Hogan
Ariella Azoulay
Chomsky
Freud
Edward Said
Memory -- Social aspects
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
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