Memory, Media & the City

Memory, Media and the City. After studying how
collective memory operates within cities, and its
relationship to literature and cinema, students
develop their own stories, or film scripts,
essays, cultural histories, plays, installations,
where the subtleties of memory (and forgetting)
are essential. For example, we will study
techniques for "unreliable narrators" in
variations of noir, as well as archival fact and
fiction across many various genres. We will also
excavate how the ambient, expressionist setting
is developed-- in cityscapes and in fictions.
These discoveries are then applied to final
projects involving research into how the facts of
a city are cannibalized as social imaginaries,
from memoirs to archives to journalism, to
scripted
spaces. Students build drafts where memory within
cities-- as an act of distortion and evasion--are
essential; or can be revealed.
Recommended for MFA and MA students in writing
programs.