All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy
is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real
condition of life and his relations with his kind.
-- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Introduction
In the late nineteenth century it became possible for doctors to make two new
clinical diagnoses: hypermnesia and amnesia, the psychological disorders of,
respectively, remembering too much and of remembering too little. According
to the philosopher Ian Hacking in Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality
And The Sciences Of Memory, these developments constitute the first appearance
of the "sciences of memory," of which Sigmund Freud's slightly later
work on psychoanalysis is, of course, the most famous example. Prior to this,
the status of memory was relatively unproblematic. In 1690, for example, the
philosopher John Locke defined personhood exclusively in terms of memory, arguing
that a person who does not remember committing a crime could not have committed
it. Locke recognized that criminals might lie about their memories, which is
why he also insisted that in cases where "want of consciousness cannot
be proved" human judiciaries may justly impose punishment.
The modern conception of memory could not be more different. By the late nineteenth
century, a fundamentally different relation between personal identity and memory
had developed. Memory still defined the person, but, as implied by Freud's notion
of the unconscious, it was no longer possible to remember your memories, particularly
those painful ones that, however much they might determine or influence you,
are buried in the unconscious. The psychoanalytic view of the self thus consists,
Hacking says, in an idea that from a Lockean perspective is "dazzling in
its implausibility"--"the idea that what has been forgotten is what
forms our character, our personality, our soul." Richard Terdiman, another
scholar of the sciences of memory, terms this forgetful condition "the
memory crisis," and regards it as one of the defining features of modernity.
The prevailing feeling in industrialized nations at the turn of the century,
he argues in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, was that
"the past had somehow evaded memory."
Why did memory become suddenly problematic in the late nineteenth century?
What changed? Hacking and Terdiman show how contingent these changes in memory
were upon the historical changes associated with industrial modernity. Our objective
in this course will be to understand the historical nature of the concern with
memory in the 20th century by closely examining what we might call the literatures
of memory in two comparative contexts, both characterized by cultural dislocation:
the US between 1900 and 1930, and post-Independence Singapore. The point of
comparison is not, of course, to suggest literary influence, but rather to investigate
similarities (and appreciate differences) in these national literatures as a
way of understanding the global context of modernity in which they both occur.
New arrivals to the United States in the early twentieth century were enjoined
to Americanize themselves, to forget the old country and adopt the practices
and ideals of the new. A similar demand confronted those who migrated from the
South to the North following the Civil War in the late nineteenth century. The
governing metaphor of this process was the so-called "melting pot." For those
who assimilated into mainstream American life there were of course rewards--particularly
financial--but also problems. Having abandoned their pasts, they felt rudderless.
Many writers and artists interpreted this problem in terms of representation.
How could the past be represented so that the one remains free of it but, at
the same time, anchored by it? We will investigate this question by studying,
in addition to a wide range of other critical and artistic artifacts, James
Weldon Johnson's novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1911),
Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925), and the first "talking picture,"
The Jazz Singer (1927).
In spite of the great differences between the US in the first decades of the
twentieth century and Singapore now, what links the two places and periods,
especially in terms of writing and strategies of representation, is change.
And as for Americans in the earlier period problems have arisen for Singaporeans.
For example, a short video from the early 90s promoting the URA's development
plan for Singapore, "Towards a Tropical City of Excellence," makes it clear
that planners are acutely aware of the psychological and existential costs of
modernization, and of the importance of preserving, as much as possible, the
familiar environments of historic buildings and districts. The URA's stated
aim is to "preserve yet upgrade" these environments. But upgrading is not exactly
preserving--indeed in some respects it would seem to preclude strict preservation.
This contradiction, so emblematic of the twin pressures of remembering and forgetting,
indicates the complexities of memory in Singaporean modernity and ensures the
persistence of concerns about identity. There are, after all, good reasons for
Singaporeans to forget the past.
In Political Legitimacy and Public Housing, Chua Beng Huat asks a recently
resettled HDB resident whether she spent much time remembering her former life
in the village. "Think of the old village also no use," she replies. "It is
not ours any longer. The new flats are already built there." Chua notes that
this attitude was typical of those he interviewed: "On the whole, within 2 ½
years the individual's grief for the lost home had been forgotten, suppressed
or filed away in their memories." Leaving the squatter settlement or shophouse,
however, involved not only repressing individual memories: it also entailed
structural changes to the extended family and to ethnically exclusive communities.
So although Singaporeans have not been asked to assimilate in the way that migrants
and immigrants in America were asked to Americanize--by adopting existing practices
in the new region or country--these two changes push them in directions that
will seem familiar from the American context: towards individualism and away
from ethnic identity. In this respect resettlement served the explicitly stated
nationalist aim of alleviating racial strife by replacing, or at least supplementing,
narrowly ethnic identities with a more abstract Singaporean identity. Shopping
and eating, it is said, now constitutes the celebrated national pastimes. Consumption,
which in this context might plausibly be regarded as a form of forgetting, neutralizes
the potentially dangerous differences between people. We'll investigate how
the need to remember and the national obligation to forget shape recent Singaporean
writing by studying Philip Jeyaretnam's novel, Abraham's Promise (1995),
along with selected poems by Edwin Thumboo, Lee Tzu Pheng, and others.
Objectives
- Appreciation of literature and a basic understanding of the elements of
literary form.
- Understanding of two historical periods and the global forces linking them.
- Ability to read closely by noticing textual details and asking questions.
- Ability to link claims with evidence (in both writing and speaking) and
to attend to the exact nature of the relation in particular cases.
- Ability to combine historical and theoretical material with textual analysis
when discussing literature.
Course Components
- Three papers
- Peer reviews of papers
- Class discussion
- Reading responses posted by students on the IVLE discussion forum
- Student presentations
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