WHY MEMORY?

DAY 2
 1. Name
2. Major
WHO ARE YOU? 3. Where you’re from
4. Memorable tradition among your family and/or
friends.
ACTIVITY

WHAT COMMUNITIES ARE YOU INTERESTED IN?

 • What is a “memory boom?” Can you think of
contemporary examples?
• Why a memory boom now:
1. International recovery of memories once ignored
2. New technologies of recording affect memory: How?
What are technologies of memory? (your generation
READINGS vs. your parents?)
QUESTIONS & • Memory appears in the media (tv, movies, books, music,
consumer goods). Where?
IDEAS 3. Memory vs. history

• What is memory? (tradition, recalling, memorializing,

ceremony, celebrating, commemorating, consuming
memory—what’s the difference?)
 “ANY GIVEN
TERMINOLOGY IS
A REFLECTION OF REALITY,
BY ITS VERY NATURE AS A
TERMINOLOGY IT MUST BE MEMORY &
A SELECTION OF REALITY,
AND TO THIS EXTENT IT FORGETTING
MUCH FUNCTION AS
A DEFLECTION OF REALITY.”
—KENNETH BURKE
“IT HURTS LIKE IT
HAPPENED
YESTERDAY”
—STEPHANIE FOO,
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
KEY IDEAS ON COLLECTIVE MEMORY

1. Collective memory is processual: it constantly forms, changes, shifts, and is performed.

2. Collective memory is unpredictable: the ways we remember events change.
3. Collective memory is partial: no single memory contains all we know about the
remembered.
4. Collective memory is useable: we use memory to do things (connecting to people, ideas,
arguments; selling products; arguing about laws).
5. Collective memory is both particular and universal: we remember individually in groups.
6. Collective memory is material: we remember through things and places.

From Barbie Zelizer’s “Reading the Past Against the Grain”