Wednesday, 19 February 2020, 4pm – 5:30pm (UCO Room 36)
The first meeting of the Cultural Memory Reading Group in Semester 2, 19-20, will be about the work of Prof. Stef Craps on the Anthropocene and Memory Studies.
Recommended Readings:
Craps, ‘Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory’, Parallax, 23.4 (2017) 479-492.
Extra Readings:
Summary of event (written by Jorge Sarasola):
As part of CIMS’s series of public lectures, Prof Stef Craps joined us to present a work-in-progress paper on his latest research project. A prominent scholar in Memory Studies, Craps shifted his attention towards the role of trauma in the climate change age and its representation in cultural products, particularly literary texts. He began by discussing the growing scientific interest in climate change-induced anxiety, especially affecting younger people. This has led some scholars in the scientific community to use the (clinically unofficial) term, ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, to capture this future-oriented sense of trauma. In other words, there is a sense in which the experience is lived in anticipation of the act of narrating afterwards. The idea of ‘anticipatory memory’, illustrated in multifarious ways in a growing body of contemporary literary production, is in line with the impetus behind Ann Rigney’s current research project (detailed in another public lecture hosted by CIMS), attempting to marry a future-oriented sense of memory with an activist agenda. This phenomenon, however, is not entirely novel. According to Craps, the sense of a ‘future-tense trauma’ was palpable in artistic productions from the inter-war period. Likewise, artists and scholars have drawn parallels between the memory of the Holocaust and the impending consequences of climate change, as well as the problems of irrepresentability in both events.
This shift in the field, often described as a fourth phase in Memory Studies, which takes into consideration our growing awareness of the Anthropocene as a period in time, raises fundamental questions about the nature of the discipline. Thinking about memory in ecological terms entails questioning the humanist assumptions which have tended to underpin our discipline. Can memory exist without a human agent? In the CIMS Reading Group which followed Craps’ lecture, we discussed the work of a photographer which captures the vegetation around the Chernobyl area and uses memory discourse. Can a plant bear witness to memory? Or does it only count as memory because it is being represented by a human agent through photography? Whose memory is it? In line with the exchange that took place during the second reading group (Alison Landsberg), is there a risk that ‘memory’ becomes only a metaphor if conceived in non-human terms?
The literary works selected and discussed by Craps addressed several of these issues. For example, one common strategy is to try and blur the boundaries between human and natural history in these narratives. Akin to how choices of narrative focalization throughout history tend to reflect broader societal concerns (e.g. a shift from third-person omniscient narrators to first-person, fragmentary, unreliable narrators), Craps raised questions about the issues of narrative viewpoint in these texts. Who can represent the world after mass extinction? This has led authors to develop elaborate literary strategies in order to avoid this practical limitation. Representing climate change in terms of time also presents remarkable challenges, as this phenomenon is characterised by a complex temporality which defies the linear idea of time often found in novels. Therefore, it was suggested that hybrid forms are often selected by artists as the way forward to represent this phenomenon. Considering this fourth phase in Memory Studies also introduces new questions about old concepts in the field: (i) climate change, perpetrators and bystanders; (ii) the loss of the archive after mass extinction; (iii) digital memory and storage; and (iv) the importance of interdisciplinarity and transnationalism as inherent to climate change.