A4551 Memory and Modernity
History/Theory SeminarAndrew Benjamin
This seminar will be concerned initially with tracing the interconnection between memory and the movement of historical time. Working with the writings of Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Sigfried Krakauer and Theodor Adorno, what will be taken as central will be the emergence of memory as a specific problem for modernity. It is the necessary interconnection of memory and modernity that will open up the way in which problems of home, place and homelessness are presented and thought within elements of contemporary philosophy. The fragmentation that is taken to mark out modernity pertains not just to the nature of historical time but also to any thinking of the city and thus of the urban. An essential part of the seminar work will involve the attempt to trace the emergence of fragmentation not just as problem of size but as integral to modernity. Fragmentation will condition, in part, the problem of memory. All of these themes are of central importance both to architecture and urbanism. Consequently particular attention will be given to those moments in the texts of these authors that touch upon either the city or architectural practice.
BASIC READING
Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, Verso Books
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso Books
Theodor Adorno, Prisms, MIT Press
Georges Bataille, The Inner Experience, University of Minnesota Press
Sigfried Krakauer, The Mass Ornament, Harvard University Press
Z. Bauman, Life in Fragments, Blaewells