COLLECTIVE

MEMORY + FAMILY
Week 2
Key Ideas on Collective Memory
1. Collective memory is processual: it constantly forms, changes, shifts, and is performed.
2. Collective memory is unpredictable: the ways we remember events change.
3. Collective memory is partial: no single memory contains all we know about the
remembered.
4. Collective memory is useable: we use memory to do things (connecting to people, ideas,
arguments; selling products; arguing about laws).
5. Collective memory is both particular and universal: we remember individually in groups.
6. Collective memory is material: we remember through things and places.
From Barbie Zelizer’s “Reading the Past Against the Grain”
“The Re-Decade,”
Simon Reynolds
◦ The acceleration of history: memory
booms aren’t new but repeating pop
culture you already experienced in your
youth is.
◦ Unprecedented access to the past through
the internet.
◦ Are nostalgia and retro poisonous to pop
culture innovation?
What are the Types of Memory?
1. Individual/autobiographical: Memories in our heads.
2. Social: Private memories of those already related to one another—shared
experiences..
3. Collective: Unconnected individuals remembering the same event—
Kennedy Assassination, 9/11.
4. Public: Remembering that happens out in the open, in public, often at a
stabilitas loci—public hearth=memorial
5. Anticipatory memory: thinking about the moments we are living in as
things we’ll remember later. From Edward Casey’s “Public Memory in Tiime and Palce”
 Maurice Halbwachs
◦ Collective memory: “The groups I am a part [sic] at any time give me the means to reconstruct them [memories], upon
condition, to be sure, that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment, their way of thinking.”
◦ Collective memory is a scaffold of triggers and cues that individual memory builds upon. It allows variance and
improvisation.
◦ Passkey memories: the memories we have to perform to join a community.
◦ History periodizes (imagining itself as static and apolitical—think periods of literature here’s where it starts here’s when it
stops) vs. collective memory flows and morphs but doesn’t start and stop in clear ways.
◦ Collective memory is mundane vs. history is a record of change
◦ What are these means of reconstructing memories? Technologies? Traditions? Memorials? What about more everyday
memory signals?
◦ Voluntary + Involuntary memory: Marcel Proust’s infamous madeline cookie (taste/smell often triggers—examples?).
 WHAT ARE THE
INFRASTRUCTURES
OF FAMILY
REMEMBERING?
 HOW DOES
REMEMBERING
WORK IN
SEDARIS?
 INTRODUCING
RHETORICAL
ANALYSIS OF A
COMMUNITY OF
MEMORY
 Retro Cultural
Cottage core and Frog and Toad Core
WHAT ARE OTHER
COMMUNITIES OF
MEMORY?
 In a 1 single-spaced page, select a community of memory
and describe to me it’s worthy of analysis.

Describe what interests you about this community/culture.

Proposal Next Describe how it uniquely uses memory to do some

rhetorical work. What are its goals and values and how
Monday does memory work here.

Give me a very clear example of how this community

remembers. Show, quote, describe.

List 4 research questions you want to explore about this

community that might reveal something about the way
citizens of the 21st Century remember.
 Rhetoric: “How we perceive, what we know, what we experience, and how we act are the results of the
symbols we create and the symbols we encounter in the world.”

What is the Rhetorical Criticism: “We engage in a process of thinking about symbols, discovering how they work, and

Nature of trying to figure out why they affect us….Systematic investigation and explanation of symbolic acts and
artifacts for the purpose of understanding rhetorical processes.”

Rhetorical The power of rhetoric to shape the world: “Every symbolic choice we make results in seeing the world in

Criticism? one way rather than in another, and in contrast to animals, human experience is different because of the
symbols we use to frame it.”

“Reality is not fixed but changes according to the symbols we use to talk about it. What we count as real or
as knowledge about the world depends on how we choose to label and talk about things. This does not
mean that things do not really exist--that this book, for example, is simply a figment of your imagination.
Rather, the symbols through which our realities are filtered affect our view of the book and how we are
motivated to act toward it. ”
Setting Up a rhetorical Analysis

01 02 03
Selecting an Artifact Analyzing an Formulating a
Artifact Research Question