Abstract: This paper focuses on the nature of “monumental (or monumentalized) history” as theorized by Nietzsche in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”. It then goes on reading Roberto Bolaño’s novella By Night in Chile (especially a scene: the shoemaker’s scene or the Heroes’ Hill) in the light of those theories regarding monumental history. I argue that through his artistic use of allegory and symbol Bolaño has seriously engaged with the notion of monumental history. I find out that the scene suggests various aspects of Nietzsche’s monumental history, in particular, its disadvantages and harms for life through the portrait of the shoemaker and his singular preoccupation with the Heroes’ Hill. While Nietzsche has been my focal point, I have also used other relevant theories of history and memory, including those by Durkheim and Nora for my analysis and argumentation.
Bio: Akbar Hosain comes from Bangladesh and is a faculty at a public university there. Currently he is pursuing his Ph.D. at Illinois State University. His teaching and research interests include postcolonial theory and world literature, trauma theory, exile, and memory. He also loves to write poetry and translate work from Bangla to English.
Astract: Memory, and the recovery of buried memories, can be utilized as arms against a destructive imperialist, revisionist “history.” And yet, the distortion of memory is exactly how imperialist interests have been realized too. I look at two texts—one that represents each side of this conflict—to show how the transmission or manipulation of remembered events operates effectively for each opponent. In Thomas Gray’s “The [So-Called] Confessions of Nat Turner,” and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons, memory is the means by which each author collapses history and fiction to their own ends: Gray’s text professes to be historically accurate while betraying its own claims with what are clearly fantastical, fictional elements (hence, my insertion of “so-called” into the title); Armah’s novel sells itself as fiction yet is riddled with an ancestral past that all-too-closely aligns with historical fact. In other words, one piece is fiction masquerading as history, while the other is history masquerading as fiction. These two pieces use similar rhetorical strategies to achieve very different aims: one to justify and generate destruction for his individual benefit, the other to cause “destruction’s destruction” and repair that which has been dismembered and fragmented on behalf of a continent (Armah, Two Thousand 8).
Using Sylvia Wynter’s framework as laid out in her essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” as well as drawing on Armah’s article “Remembering the Dismembered Continent,” I explore how “history” and “fiction” become inseparable elements in texts that focus on lodging specific memories into the larger social consciousness. Ultimately, I demonstrate how both literal and literary survival rely on the extent to which one is connected to or disconnected from national and ancestral history.
Bio: Gillian Wood is a PhD student in the English Department at Tufts University. Her interests include nineteenth-century British literature, gothic literature, as well as the examination of memory and the archive.
Abstract: In a time where language itself was going through a crisis, what is the new meaning of a performative work of art in which music is used to strengthen and connect a disjointed linguistic narrative, defined by trauma? In 1955, a decade after the end of World War II, the German thinker Theodor Adorno stated in his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. Whereas Adorno didn’t mean that no form of art was possible after the Holocaust, his words reflect the difficulty to find an aesthetic approach to describe the pain and horror that the world experienced at this historical time. In this presentation, I argue that Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg’s 1947 memorial piece A Survivor from Warsaw, composed and first performed during his US exile, offers an alternative to conventional language to address trauma. By drawing from scholarship developed in the fields of Music History, Cultural Studies and Memory Studies, I perform a historically contextualized close analysis of Schönberg’s work, in which I analyze the interactions between the different languages in the piece (English, German and Hebrew) and the music. In Schönberg’s piece, the perspective of the victims, perpetrators and survivors are disconnected from each other through the use of different languages. Simultaneously, they are connected back together through atonal music, understood here as a narrative device that serves as a new language to express the horror and trauma triggered by the Holocaust. As I argue, the combination of music and language(s), as well as Schönberg’s collaborations with other exile artists when composing the piece, and the first performances of the piece in the US weaved a multi-level network of connections between the victims of the Holocaust, the German/Jewish exile community and the American audiences and public.
Bio: Ester González Martín is a PhD candidate in the German program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in German Studies at the University of Salamanca, her hometown, where she also earned the Professional Degree in Music at the Conservatory of Music. Ester holds a MA degree in Linguistics and Science of Language at UNED in Spain, and an MA in German Cultural Studies at UMass Amherst, and she has presented her research at conferences such as the Women in German annual conference, or the MLA conference. Currently, Ester is working on a prospectus for her dissertation, in which she studies interconnections between music and language in the life and works of German-speaking exiles in the US, at the end of WWII.