Wednesday 23 March, 5-6.30pm: On Svetlana Boym’s article Nostalgia and its Discontents (from The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2007), a piece that summarises the key points of her book The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001)—with a special focus on her distinction between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgias. The article is available via this link.
As a secondary reading, we suggested an English translation of Johannes Hofer’s Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia or Homesickness. In this short work (about 12 pages long) originally published in 1688, Hofer, a Swiss physician, invented the word nostalgia to identify a disease which appeared to admit “no remedy other than a return to the native land”: MEDICAL DISSERTATION ON NOSTALGIA BY JOHANNES HOFER, 1688 on JSTOR.