This module will discuss the processes of memory and the factors which shape the differences between official, public and popular representations of World War Two and related twentieth-century conflicts. It will focus on autobiography as a genre and addresses the importance of time, class, gender and nationality in the construction of identities. It will analyse how a range of European writers have responded to the imperative of testimony and the ways in which literary texts function as privileged vectors for remembering and forgetting individual and collective experiences of resistance, suffering, persecution, deportation and liberation.

Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of the key concepts and arguments surrounding memory, culture and war

Critically analyse and evaluate literary texts and their socio-historical contexts

Formulate and debate the literary and filmic strategies of the authors studied and apply these to wider debates on the intersections of text, context and culture

Demonstrate and apply theoretical and conceptual models of analysis to literary and cultural production

Teaching is delivered via eleven two-hour seminars in which students will prepare questions and discussion topics.

Academic: intellectually advanced skills centred on the ability to construct an argument, using various sources on themes and topics related to the module content

Subject-specific: literary and cultural skills centred on the ability to understand how literary and cultural materials engage with European cultural identities

Generic skills: transferable skills centred on written communication and word processing skills; information gathering; critical thinking and evaluation of materials, oral presentation skills; time management skills, intercultural awareness

The opportunity for reassessment in this module

Should students fail to complete or pass this module, they will be offered the opportunity to resubmit the assessed essay component for a maximum of 50%.

Syllabus content

Primary texts for study are:

David Rousset: A World Apart

Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits

Anonymous: A Woman in Berlin

Carlo Levi: Christ Stopped at Eboli

Javier Cercas: Soldiers of Salamis

Indicative Reading and Resource List:

Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Post-War Europe (Berg, 1999)

European Memories of the Second World War, ed. H. Peitsch, C. Burdett and C. Gorrara (Berghahn, 1999)

Reconstructing the Past: Reconstructing the Fascist Era in Post-War European Cultureed. G Bartram, M Slawinski and D. Steel (Keele University Press, 1996)

War and Memory in the Twentieth Centuryed. M. Evans and K. Lunn (1997)

The Politics of War, Memory and Commemorationeds. T Ashplant, G. Dawson and S Roper (Routledge, 2000)

Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Centuryeds. W. Kidd and B Murdoch (Ashgate, 2005)

War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Centuryeds. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge UP, 1999)

Memory of Catastropheed. Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (Manchester UP, 2004)

Memory and Power in Postwar Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Pasted. Jan Werner Muller (Cambridge UP 2002)

Samuel Amago, True Lies: Narrative Self-Consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Bucknell UP, 2007)

Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Harvard UP, 2006)

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonisation (Stanford UP, 2009) 

Constructions of Conflict: Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media,eds. K. Hall and K. N. Jones (Peter Lang, 2011)

Memories and Representations of World War 1 and World War 2eds. E Lamberti and V Fortunati (Rodopi, 2009)