Mediatized Past: Methodological Approaches to Representations of the Past

elective courses

This course proposes an overview of media formats in such disciplines as memory studies, cultural studies, and history, emphasizing their status as media texts and pointing out to methodological approaches to their analysis and interpretation. It is subdivided into sections devoted to a particular medium: testimony, fictional film, documentary film, photography, digital databases/online platforms, and popular culture. Finally, it zeroes in on novel digital formats of presenting and disseminating knowledge. The course merges theory with hands-on application of theoretical concepts to a variety of media texts and formats.

This course proposes an overview of media formats in such disciplines as memory studies, cultural studies, and history, emphasizing their status as media texts and pointing out to methodological approaches to their analysis and interpretation. It is subdivided into sections devoted to a particular medium: testimony (in its printed, audio, and audiovisual form), fictional film (affect, counterfactual narratives), documentary film (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its outtakes), photography (Alfred Kahn, Zofia Rydet), digital databases/online platforms (digital archives, YouTube), and popular culture (popular music, graphic novels). Finally, it zeroes in on novel digital formats of presenting and disseminating knowledge (video essay, arts-based research, rephotography). The course merges theory with hands-on application of theoretical concepts to a variety of media texts and formats

Bernstein, Julia. “The Art of Testimony: David Boder and his Archive of Holocaust Survivors’ Audio-Interviews.” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 3 (2018): 354–371.

Bignall, Simone and Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Systems.” In ed. Simone Bignall and Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Caruth, Cathy. “Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour).” In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2016.

Cazenave, Jennifer. An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Albany: SUNY Press 2019.

Commane, Gemma and Rebekah Potton. “Instagram and Auschwitz: a Critical Assessment of the Impact Social Media has on Holocaust Representation,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 25, iss. 1–2 (2019): 158–181.

Dalziel, Imogen. “‘Romantic Auschwitz’: Examples and Perceptions of Contemporary Visitor Photography at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 22, iss. 2–3 (2016): 185–207.

Dragan, Cristian Eduard. “Foregrounding the Digital Medium: Self-reference and Metareference in Video Essays,” Ekphrasis 26, iss. 2 (2021): 111–127.

Handley, William R. “Re-Viewing Western U.S. Rephotography in the Anthropocene.” Kronoscope 19, (2019): 153–187.

Jakobsen, Kjetil Ansgar and Milena Nikolova. “The Kahn Archive: A Visual Memory that is Truly Cosmopolitan?” In Trond Erik Bjorli, Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen, Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet. Intellect Books, 2020.

Joskowicz, Ari. “The Age of the Witness and the Age of Surveillance: Romani Holocaust Testimony and the Perils of Digital Scholarship.” The American Historical Review 125, iss. 4 (2020): 1205–1231.

Kaplan, Brett Ashley. “Too painful to forget, too painful to remember: Ashes of memory in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Duras’s La douleur (1985).” Memory Studies 14, iss. 4 (2021): 1–22.

Kazlauskaitė, Rūta. “Knowing Is Seeing: Distance and Proximity in Affective Virtual Reality History.” Rethinking History 26, iss. 1 (2022): 51–70.

Koenen, Erik, Christian Schwarzenegger and Juraj Kittler. “Data(fication): ‘Understanding the World Through Data’ as an Everlasting Revolution.” In ed. Gabriele Balbi, Nelson Ribeiro, Valérie Schafer, Christian Schwarzenegger, Digital Roots: Historicizing Media and Communication Concepts of the Digital Age. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2021.

Landsberg, Alison. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia UP, 2015.

Lundemo, Trond.“Digital Returns: The Archives of the Planet and the ‘Rhythm of Life.” In Trond Erik Bjorli, Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen, Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahns Archives of the Planet. Intellect Books, 2020.

Müller, Beate. “Translating Trauma: David Boder’s 1946 Interviews with Holocaust Survivors.” Translation and Literature 23, (2014): 257–71.

Petrovsky, Helen. “Exploring the Photographic Sign.” In ed. Krzysztof Pijarski, Object Lessons: Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2017.

Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” The American Historical Review 121, iss. 2 (2016): 377–402.

Serraf, Lola. “Holocaust Impiety in 21st Century Graphic Novels: Younger Generations ‘No Longer Obliged to Perpetuate Sorrow’.” Genealogy 3, iss. 4 (2019): 1–13.

Shandler, Jeffrey. Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2017.

Vice, Sue and Dominic Williams, “’Non-Sites of Memory’: Poland in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 21, (2021): 35–54.

Wasserman, Sara. “Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject.” In The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Weliczker, Leon. Brygada śmierci: pamiętnik więźnia Sonderkommando 1005. Łódź: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1946.

---, The death brigade: (The Janowska road). New York: Holocaust Library, 1978.

White, John. “Affect and the Immersive Experience of Bodily Excess: The Revenant (2015).” In The Contemporary Western: An American Genre post 9/11. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019.

Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes. “The Uses of Walter: Walter Benjamin and the Counterfactual Imagination.” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 49, iss. 3 (2010): 361–383.

Knowledge: knows and understands

P8S_WG.1 as well as is able to critically assess existing paradigms in international research, its theorethical fundamentals, general and specific problems in cultural studies, literary studies, history and similar disciplines

P8S_WG.2 main developments in cultural studies, literary studies, history and similar disciplines

P8S_WG.3 methodology in cultural studies, literary studies, history and similar disciplines

Skills: is able to

P8S_UW.1 apply knowledge in cultural studies, literary studies, history and similar disciplines to creatively identify, formulate and innovatively solve complex problems or perform research tasks, in particular to

- define the goal and object of academic research, formulate a research hypothesis

- develop research methods, techniques, and tools and creatively apply them

- argue on the basis of research results

P8S_UK.1 communicate in a specialised way to be able to participate in international academic life

P8S_UK.4 participate in academic discourse

P8S_UK.5 use English on the C1/C2 level so that they can participate in international academic and professional environment

Social competence: is ready to

P8S_KK.3 acknowledge the import of knowledge in solving cognitive and practical problems

P8S_KR.1 keep up and develop the ethos of research communities so that

- research is carried out independently

- the results of research are public property, provided that intellectual property is protected

The final grade is based on class participation (25%) and the final project (an academic essay approx. 10 pages based on at least 10 secondary sources or a video essay/presentation – 75%). The assessment of the final project is based on the scope of critical application of methods presented in class, mastery of academic argument, and/or the understanding of visual media.

The choice of topics is the responsibility of the students, ideally they should be based on their PhD projects. Students are allowed to have 3 absences. Retake entails rewriting/redoing the final project.