Module Directory

Memories of war are often highly politicised and controversial, becoming bedrocks of national myths. To challenge these memories, and these myths, is often to challenge the fundamental ideas that national cultures are based on. This module looks at the construction, circulation and contestation of war memory in a variety of national contexts, and at different points in the past.

This module focuses on three broad themes: commemoration, popular culture, and the politics of remembering the past. We will discuss topics including the symbolism of the `poppy` in commemorating the First World War, the depiction of the Second World War in film, the memory of the Vietnam War in the United States, and the different ways societies have remembered the bombing of civilians throughout the twentieth century.

The aims of this module are:

• To provide students with an advanced understanding of how the memory of war and conflict has been used subsequently in different cultures and societies.


• To develop students’ understanding of the different forms the memory of war and conflict takes, including formal commemorative practices, representations within popular culture, and within political culture.


• To provide students with the tools to analyse contemporary debates surrounding the memory of warfare and commemoration, using sophisticated analytical arguments and deploying relevant historical examples.

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Compare in a sophisticated way the different forms war memory has taken in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.


2. Analyse in depth how war and conflict has been remembered in different cultures and societies.


3. Demonstrate an advanced understanding of how memory is constructed, circulated and contested in societies and cultures.

The memories surrounding war and conflict are defining features of cultures and societies around the world. Wars are remembered in a variety of ways: through commemoration, in in individual and family stories, within popular culture, and within political narratives.

These memories often tell us more about the present (or rather the time in which they are remembered) than about the wars and conflicts themselves. In fact, analysing how war is remembered today is often one of the best ways to understand how all types of history can be deployed to serve different purposes in the present.

Syllabus

• Introduction to the Module.


• Understand Memory: Concepts and Practices.


• Poppies and the Policitics of Commemoration, 1919-Now.


• The Vietnam War Memorial.


• Gender and Memory of the Second World War in British Film.


• Fiction and the First World War in the 1990s.


• The Search for a Useable Past in Post-War Europe.


• 'Difficult Memories': Bombing Civilians in the Second World War.


• Reckoning with the Past: American Civil War in Contemporary America.

This module will be delivered via:

• One 2-hour seminar per week.