ENGL 5/690: Rhetoric and Memory (original) (raw)

Over the past several decades, the study of memory has proliferated across the humanities in general and rhetorical studies in particular. One of the five classic canons of rhetoric, memory has served a fruitful site for understanding rhetoric and its functions. At the same time, rhetorical approaches have produced rich and distinctive ways of conceptualizing memory. With a focus on texts of classic and contemporary rhetoric, this class will explore that rich territory. In what ways is the practice of memory rhetorical, and what does a rhetorical perspective tell us about memory? Is memory best understood as an experience, an active practice, a passive process? If memory represents the past, in what ways does it do so? Is it fair to call memory to represent at all? How might it instead re-make the past, as well as the present and the future? In what ways does memory and its rhetorical power extend beyond the individual mind, to collective, cultural, material, and lived realms? How do objects, places, archives, technologies, and practices participate in remembrance? In addition to asking after the character and workings of memory, we will also, as rhetoricians, be concerned with its effects: How do memory practices create values, circulate affects, shape perceptions, provoke actions? In what ways does remembrance call publics, objects, and even worlds into being? How does it shape national, sexual, gendered, and cultural identities? On the other hand, how does memory move between and across the borders of those identities? Related to these questions, in what ways does memory proceed as an exercise of power, potentially colonizing or decolonizing, imperializing or democratizing, the spaces of our lives? How does memory work in intensely emotional ways, at the core of experiences of trauma, loss, mourning, and melancholy? Finally, as we will consider especially in the last week, what are the values and dangers of forgetting, forgiving, and reconciling? As we proceed through these questions, we will consider in tandem how rhetorical studies offers us a unique perspective on memory, as well as what the workings of memory tell us about the workings of rhetoric in general.