A scholarly context for the researcher-training course

Course topic

”Aesthetic Memory: Remembrance, Trauma, Place, Space, and Boundaries”

Point of departure: In recent years, the problems of representation as well as basic problems of space, places, topographies and boundaries in aesthetic, textually acting language (taken in a wide and inter-aesthetic sense) have come to the centre of attention within all the disciplines targeted by the course. Such representational features act, i.e. they are performatively active in the installment and/or the transformation of spatial structures, including bodies and genders. These traits are tied in precisely with the problems of representation: on the one hand, they reveal and include phenomenal reality, on the other, they transform, install, and create alternate reality.

In literature, theatre, media and the arts, life is topographically modelled in the tensions between representation and construction. In the arts, focus is given to how artistic utterances, depictions and modes of language are produced by human and material/technological action – in that sense they are phenomena that occur, happen. In depiction, reality’s various and complex modes are highlighted – real, imaginary, symbolic; so are reality’s aspects of both actuality and virtuality. The arts allow for an understanding of human subjectivity as contingency (and thereby as bodies and spaces undergoing change) – more than as lasting, identical selves (which presuppose continuity in time). Thus, literature, theatre, media and the arts offer the possibility to reflect upon the historicity and the mediality of space, places, topographies and boundaries, as phenomena being created and transformed – before and beyond (as conditions of possibility for) space in the quotidian sense of being an ”absolute” structure of subjectivity and objectivity. A crucial concern is that literature, art forms, genres and media offer models and produce particular mappings of reality; that is to say, they act as modelling interventions in human, social and historical reality: With depictional strategies, and with effects (as well as affects), they produce representations as well as construct virtual models of the spatial, subjectivities and the corporeal.

Topical link: The given basic-problem perspective on the problems of representation becomes particulary urgent and interesting when linked to the primary topic of the current researcher-training course – the basic problems of remembrance and memory, and the way memory – aesthetically, existentially and ethically – is installed, established, mediated, and received. Not least, this concerns memorially mediated traumatic experiences. Remembrance and memory are basic factors within the self-understanding and the production of communities, cultures, and individuals. But, paradoxically, the shifting borders, spaces, gazes and desires of those communities and subjectivites at the same time re-mediate, create and transform precisely the paradigms of possibility that are necessary for the construction of remembrance and memory.

Currently, a series of PhD-projects are dealing with the investigation of trauma, memory, and remembrance in our time, at the cultural cross-section between the real world and literature, theatre, media and the arts. Other projects research how desires, bodies, fashion, science, politics, medicine, industry, the commercial world and existential human experience condition and motivate the subject and its reminiscences. Even other projects investigate the territorial, social and cultural roles of the arts, the theatre and literature, how the acting and (re)generating body and histrionic practices in the arts and in culture lay new foundations for apperception and for memory, and how the displacement of cultural, political and artistic topographies is tied in with the emergence of new modes of memory, of bliss and mourning, and affect. Also a great number of established scholars within the whole range of aesthetic disciplines share these investigating interests and are presently doing research in this field – in order to gain new insights by way of both critical reflection, appropriation and the development of new ways of (self)understanding and thought.

Currently, our immediate contacts with the traumatised, remembering, and first-hand mediating victims of Modernity’s violent abuses against culture and civilisation are about to wane – by the passing away of those involved first-hand. Traumatising experiences of that extreme order have at the same time become further removed from the local, everyday lives of large segments of newer generations, though they have forcefully reappeared for some. Precisely at this juncture we witness that the basic problems of memory, remembrance, traumatisation, space, places and boundaries become particularly acute and focused, not least by literature’s, the theatre’s, the cinema’s and art’s own, creative performers. This is actually happening in art and literature today: There, the individual, cultural, civilizational and historical questions connected to memory are being posed anew, in new ways, and by new means – How can memory’s conditions of possibility be described, analyzed and understood? What are the functons and the roles of memory’s management and mediation? What crucial paradigmatic influences are exerted – by rapidly shifting and displaced individual, artistic and cultural borders and spaces – on how memory and its forms and figures are constituted, perceived by a gaze, re-mediated and transformed?

These are some of the questions, their modes and their means, that the TBLR’s Berlin researcher-training course will focus upon – by way of inviting a broad, inter-aesthetic plethora of established scholars in the field to share part of their work and to discuss with a number of PhD-students from Norway who likewise will share their projects, their concerns, queries, comments and engangement in the field, in an inter-disciplinary meeting of literary, aesthetic and cultural studies. The programme will be composed of keynote lectures, a congenial selection of curricular theoretical texts and a number of PhD-student papers, group sessions on the curriculum, as well as open plenary discussions – engaging both PhD-students, TBLR faculty, and invited guests. – The five internationally oriented scholars will lecture about basic problems in their disciplines and within their focused literatures/media/arts (hopefully with examples) in the field of memory, remembrance, and memory management – historically, and in the transitions between traditional patterns and the currently ongoing construction of memory.

The course programme thus represents the perspectives of aesthetic disciplines as well as those of cultural studies and their current research, of relevant literary, theatrical, media and art forms, and of current theoretical, empirical and cultural-studies foci upon them.