'Aesthetics and Ethics of Memory' is the inaugural seminar of Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies, a newly established international collaborative initiative for graduate education in memory studies.
Aesthetics and ethics often intersect in relation to the representation of collective memories, especially those of disturbing events or experiences. While decorum is naturally called for in addressing a traumatic past, it can also be argued, from an ethical standpoint, that traumatic memories must be represented in a compelling and unforgettable manner. Representational strategies thus have to find a balance between being ineffectual and irrelevant and being potentially offensive and provoking.
At the seminar a number of questions following from the main theme will be discussed:
Venue: ‘Kasernen’ at Aarhus University, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Langelandsgade 139, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Building 1585 and 1584.
PROGRAMME
September 20 (room 212)
14:00 Registration and welcome (NB! in building 1585, the foyer)
14:30 Keynote, Andrea Pinotti: ‘Monument Nonument: The Paradoxes of Monumental Memory (chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen)
15:45 Coffee
16:15 Panel 1: Forms of historical representation (chair: Stijn Vervaet)
Agata Pietrasik (Warsaw / Berlin): The Ethics of Form: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial
Maud Guichard-Marneur (Copenhagen): The form of historical representation within the museum setting of the Schindler Factory Museum, Krakow, Poland
17:30 Panel 2: Memory and the archive (chair: Kristina Fjelkestam)
Ole V.G. Olesen-Bagneux (Copenhagen): Is the library memory?
Marcos Beck Bohn (Sao Paolo): The Time of Recollection
19:00 Dinner (tapas buffet at the university)
September 21 (different rooms; see below)
9:15 Keynote: Sharon Macdonald: ‘Cosmopolitanism and transnational heritage’ (in Store sal, chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen)
10:30 Coffee
11:00 Panel 3: Performances of memory (in room 120, chair: Stijn Vervaet)
Jenelle Davis (Illinois): Counter-Memorials and Commemorative Actions: Contemporary Memorial Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Nadiya Chushak (Melbourne): Mesmerized by the Nostalgic Representations of the Yugoslav Past? Aesthetics and Ethics of Yugonostalgia
Sara Tanderup (Aarhus): At the Limits of Literary Representation
12:30 Lunch
13:45 Panel 4: Negotiations of national heritage (in room 112, chair: Frederik Tygstrup)
Karen Lindo and Giullia Nazarro: Australian National Heritage: Civilizing the Natives for Cultural Consumption?
Hanna Teichler (Frankfurt): Fiction, facts and forcible removal: Narrative depictions of Australia’s (post)colonial history
Alice Heeren (Illinois): On Mourning and Historical Amnesia: The Perennial Modernity of Brazilian Architecture
Panel 5 is cancelled due to cancellation from Olga Rodriguez. Alice Heeren is moved to panel 4
15:15 Coffee
15:45 Panel 6: Transnational memories of the Holocaust (in room 112, chair: Stijn Vervaet)
Zhuang Wei (Frankfurt): The medial representation of the „Shanghai Ghetto“ (1943-1945)
Anna Szász (Budapest): “I am not concerned with copying anymore. I paint all my thoughts.” Politics and ethics in Omara’s work
Kirril Shields (Queensland): Selective Memory: Australian Culture, Australian Literature, and a Nation’s Representation of the Third Reich Perpetrator
19:00 Dinner at ‘Godsbanen’
September 22 (in room 212)
9:30 Keynote, Ann Rigney: ‘Memory by Numbers: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Counting’ (chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen)
10:45 Coffee
11:00 Panel 7: Literature as a medium of memory (chair: Frederik Tygstrup)
Chris Lloyd (London): Remembering Slavery: Museums, Monuments, Novels
Maria Elisabeth Hüren (Frankfurt): (Re-)Attaching Detached Readers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sunas a Postcolonial Civil War Narrative
Palle Nørgaard (Aarhus): Self-representation and the other: Ethical Dimensions of New Spanish Life Writing in Esther Tusquets and Kirmen Uribe
12:30 Lunch (sandwiches)
13:30 Panel 8: The aesthetics of complicity (chair: Pieter Vermeulen)
Veronique Bragard (Louvain) and Karen Lindo: The sensorial redemption of the perpetrator’s tale: Style and confession in Wilfried N’Sondé’s Le Silence des esprits
Toby Smethurst (Ghent): Perpetration and Victimhood in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and On The Natural History of Destruction
Maria Zirra (Utrecht): Complicitous Poetics: The Aesthetics of Confession in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
15:00 Coffee
15:30 Panel 9: After witnessing (chair: Pieter Vermeulen)
Daniel Pedersen (Stockholm): Memory and Holocaust after the Last Witness
Joana Craveiro (London): Foreign Looks on the Portuguese Revolution: Displaced and post-memory approaches to a dictatorship, revolution and post-dictatorship
Johanne Bøndergaard (Aarhus): Authentically sick: On the case of Casper Schjødt Nielsen: Samlede Journaler 1996-2009
17:00 Roundtable talk / closing remarks
18:30 Dinner (tapas buffet at the university)
Contact:
Research Assistant, PhD, Kasper Green Krejberg. Email: kaspergk@hum.au.dk, Phone: + 4587163067 / +4531127374
Associate Professor, PhD, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. Email: litmrt@hum.au.dk, Phone: +4587163029
Please note that paper presentations are scheduled to 20 min plus 10 min for discussion.
Keynote speakers are:
Sharon Macdonald, Professor, Department of Sociology, The University of York. Professor Macdonald is the author of Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (Routledge, 2009).
Andrea Pinotti, Professor of Philosophy, Università degli Studi, Milan. Professor Pinotti directs the programme “Monument. Nonument. Politique de l’image mémoirelle, esthétique de la mémoire matérielle” at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris.
Ann Rigney, Professor of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University. Professor Rigney is the author of The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford UP, 2012).
Practical Information
Where: Aarhus University, Denmark
When: 20-22 September 2012
Fee: 250 euros; please pay and register via AU Webshop before June 22, 2012 (the fee is payable with the following credit cards: VISA, MasterCard, Maestro, VISA Electron, American Express, JCB).
What’s included: Attendance, accommodation in tourist-class hotel in the centre of Aarhus, all meals
What’s not included: Travel
Aarhus is easily accessible from both Billund (BLL) and Aarhus (AAR) airports and by train from Copenhagen.
Learn more about Aarhus University at www.au.dk/en/.
