Remembering and Representing - AME5003

Assessment 1: Oral presentation/assessment

Presentation; in-class pitch for Summative 2 (equiv. to 1,000 words).

Presentation

Assessment 2: Practical Skills Assessment

A design, proposal, and rationale for a ‘real-world’ public engagement vehicle

Practical Skills Assessment

Assessment 1: Written Assignment

Written assignment, with a case study comparing/contrasting at least two different forms of commemoration/ memorialisation of the Holocaust (or other genocides).

Written Assignment

How do we go about memorialising and commemorating the Holocaust – and how should we? How is it possible even to begin to represent what happens in a genocide? This module will steer you through the complex theoretical, practical, and ethical debates involved in these questions. Interdisciplinary in nature, the module will offer you the opportunity to study documents that might offer autobiographical, fictional, historical, literary, filmic, or heritage-based perspectives as answers to them. Spanning an array of different forms, which can range from the smaller, individual scale of the personal testimony or oral history to the larger, public scale of the heritage sector or the film industry, you will investigate, debate, and reflect on how the personal and the public, the political and the aesthetic, intersect and intertwine in any attempt to depict or memorialise the Holocaust. The module also includes public engagement training as part of the practical debates we study, allowing students to make an informed choice about their later research project.

School of Arts and Humanities

Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006)
Blick, Hugo (Dir.), Black Earth Rising, BBC (2019)
Cetin, Fethiye, My Grandmother (Verso, 2008)
Kent, Nicholas, Srebrenica (Oberon, 2005)
Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (Abacus, 2013)
Reznikoff, Charles, Holocaust (Five Leaves, 2009)
Saul, Nicholas and Susan Tebbutt (eds), Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter Images of “Gypsies”/Romanies in European Cultures (Liverpool University Press, 2004)
Schlink, Bernhard, The Reader (Vintage, 1999)
Sonneman, Toby, Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2014)
Whitehead, Anne, ‘Telling Tales: Trauma and Testimony in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s “Fragments”, Discourse 25: 1/2 (2003, 119-137)
Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (Schocken, 1997)

History

AME5003 - Remembering and Representing

Remembering and Representing

be able to deal with complex theoretical and practical issues around representing and remembering the Holocaust, making informed critical judgements about them from a range of perspectives, in the absence of clear-cut guiding principles.

be able to formulate, articulate, and justify a clear vision of good practice in commemorating the Holocaust (and/or other genocides).

be able to demonstrate initiative, self-direction and originality in planning and carrying out both public facing and scholarly work. 

be able to systematically evaluate, compare and contrast the historical, aesthetic, ethical, and political principles involved in memorialising and commemorating the Holocaust (and/or other genocides).

be able to conduct and appraise research-based scholarship on primary, secondary, and theoretical or historiographic sources pertaining to Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

be able to exercise creativity and sound ethical judgement in approaching practical issues involved in commemorating and/or memorialising the Holocaust (and/or other genocides).

be able to demonstrate advanced knowledge of a range of cultural forms in which the Holocaust (and/or other genocides) has been represented, together with a sophisticated critical awareness of their insights and limitations.