The Ancient World & Modern Theory: Memory and Forgetting

Course

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/L_OAMAOHS015

Course Objective

This module is concerned with the role of memory and forgetting in (the study of) the societies of the ancient world. Students will acquaint themselves with past and current theories and methodologies used in the field of Memory Studies. They will explore the possibilities and limitations of such approaches for their fields of study, asking for instance whether these theories can be applied only to the modern recollection of Antiquity, or also to the dynamics of memory and forgetting in the past, including in Antiquity itself. The module aims at being interdisciplinary in a broad sense: it combines the study of texts and material sources (through narratology, linguistics, rhetoric, historiography, iconography, material culture studies, etc.) and it assesses the value of a selection of current theoretical frameworks for our fields. After successful completion of this course, the student: ― has a good understanding of several theoretical approaches and methodologies concerned with memory and forgetting as a general field of study; ― has knowledge of relevant and influential theoretical and methodological considerations concerning memory and forgetting as applied to the interpretation of ancient textual and material sources; ― has knowledge of explicit and implicit theories of and perspectives on memory and forgetting as can be found in the ancient source material; ― is able to reflect critically on abovementioned approaches and their possibilities and limitations, particularly as concerns their application in Classical Studies; ― is able to apply these to his or her own research of the ancient world and its reception; ― is able to reflect on concepts and methods that are relevant for executing individual and team-based research projects and to apply them to primary sources; ― is able to take a stance in the academic debate on the course’s topic.

Course Content

Remembering and forgetting are essential elements of human thinking. We are remembering and forgetting things on a day-to-day basis, on an individual level but also as a collective body of people. Obviously, people in the ancient world were well aware of the importance of memory and forgetting, which they experienced themselves and about which they theorized in the context, for example, of rhetoric, philosophy and politics. In recent decades, studies of memory and forgetting in the social sciences and in the humanities have taken flight. Memory is seen in these modern approaches as a collective action, establishing the meanings and significance of past events, and thus making those past events relevant to the moment of remembrance. They also deal with processes of appropriation, restitution, and musealization. Of course, it also occurs that one just happens to remember something by chance, but Memory studies are interested rather in the active representation of the past in the present. Likewise, loss of knowledge can be accidental, but scholars have recently focused on the cultural production of ignorance by forgetting, by not selecting, or by suppressing facts. Memory and forgetting thus play a key role in identity formation and negotiation. Sites both physical and abstract can play an important role as focal points of collective memory. Such lieux de mémoire can be places, settlements, or landscapes, but also symbols, objects and works of literature. By their existence, lieux de mémoire impose choices of what was considered to be part of the collective memory and what was to be excluded or forgotten. To some extent, the study of classics itself can be said to originate from one or more particular lieux de mémoire. To name one example: in the third century BCE, the famous library in Alexandria in Egypt became a center for the philological study of earlier Greek literature. The institute attracted writers, scholars, and manuscripts from all over the Greek world. The Alexandrian librarians did not just write catalogues of all that was in the library, but they also selected the authors they found normative, the enkrithentes, ‘the authors admitted after examination’. In Latin they were later called ‘first class authors’, the classici. The concept of selection has the positive connotation of conservation, but there is also a negative side to it. By choosing one thing, one is neglecting the other. Whereas ‘the authors admitted after examination’ were published in critical editions, the authors who were excluded from the list were copied less and less. Thus, we have to thank the Alexandrian scholars for what we have left of Greek poetry and the Greek historians, but we can also blame them for at least part of what we lost. While this will be one approach to memory studies this course examines, it will also delve into ancient thinking about memory. In fact, the term lieux de mémoire itself is a translation of a concept that was coined in ancient rhetoric, namely locus memoriae. This concept had an entirely different meaning altogether in rhetorical handbooks, but it does offer an interesting insight into ancient thinking about (individual) memory. We will examine ideas about individual and collective memory and forgetting as expressed in rhetorical, philosophical and medical writings, but also as important processes in the ancients’ handling of politics and history. In this module, we will first pay attention to the foundations and current state of the relevant theoretical and interpretative frameworks. Second, we will address the application of these approaches to Classics, Ancient Studies, and Archaeology. Much of memory studies was developed with a focus on modern day practices of remembering and forgetting, sometimes even suggesting that new media have completely changed our connection with the past. Therefore, it will be important to see whether they can be applied not just to the present-day memory of Antiquity, but also to the dynamics of remembering and forgetting Antiquity in the past and even in Antiquity itself, as in the examples mentioned above. Our approach in this course is interdisciplinary, as we will be looking at the way these theoretical frameworks can add to other approaches to texts and material culture.

Teaching Methods

Lectures (once a week) and seminars (once a week).

Method of Assessment

Essay (80%); (group) presentation of an interdisciplinary case study (20%). The resit regulations will be specified in the course manual.

Literature

Will be announced on Canvas.

Target Audience

This course is developed for students of the MA and RMA programmes in Classics and Ancient Civilizations and the students of the Educational MA programme in Classics. In addition, the course is open as an elective for a limited number of MA students specializing in Archaeology or Ancient History. Students who are interested should contact the coordinator well in time and state their motivation.
Academic year1/09/2431/08/25
Course level6.00 EC

Language of Tuition

  • English

Study type

  • Master