EGMT 1540: Holding On: The Ethics of Memory

This course is about the ethics of memory—about the relative strengths of our obligations to preserve and to transcend the past. To what extent should we strive to remember where we (as species or culture or family or individual) have been? What resources do we have at our disposal for that remembrance? To what extent should we focus instead on where we are and expect to go? Are these processes always mutually exclusive? Or can a respect for the past coexist with, even underlie, an open-minded regard for the present and the future? Across the quarter we will examine a range of memorial phenomena tied to personal and cultural recollection. Some of these phenomena (mourning, nostalgia) are primarily psychological. Others (monuments, museums) are primarily material. Others still (funeral rites, verbal testimony) lie somewhere in between. Our goal in every case will be to deduce their intended functions and to debate the right- or wrongness of their actual effects.