Identity and History

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Identity and History

• Literary Criticism
• Identity, Trauma and Globalization
• Introduction
• Fall 2004
• Kate Liu

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Outline

• Identity and History
• Q1 -- What is Identity?
• Q2 -- History what
• examples -- Time in a Bottle
• examples -- The Dream Before
• Q3 -- History -- why and how?
• examples
• Two Villages
• Somewhere in Time
• About our Course

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Q 1 Identity

• What is Identity?
• Does it matter to you? If so, how do you define
  your identity (or identities)?

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Identity Who am I?
explanation
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Body, Desire, Work, Experience, Memory/Trauma
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Identity Who am I?

• To talk about our identity, we try to answer the
  question, "Who am I?"
• We have different kinds of collective identity
• national identity, social identity,
  cultural/racial identity, class identity,
  familial identity, gender identity, sexual
  identity, etc. 
• All these identities are formed beyond our
  control (at least partly).   (This explains why
  some contemporary theories say that we have
  multiple identity and that our identity is
  split.)

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Identity Who am I? (2)

• Out of all of these inter-related kinds of
  collective identity we form our personal (sense
  of) identity.   "Usually" we do not loudly
  pronounce (articulte and/or defend) a certain
  kind of identity unless it is strongly related to
  our beliefs or unless it is threatened.
• However, constructions of our identities and our
  personal senses of them, consciously or not, are
  written on our bodies and embodied in our actions
  in daily life, which, in turn, become
  historical traces written on our bodies.

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Q 2 History what

• What is history? What do you think about the
  following statements
• Shes history.
• The past is passé, gone forever.
• We should put the past behind us and move
  forward.
• History is progressive. History repeats itself.
  
• . . . to the elderly all the past is not a
  diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow
  which no winter ever quite touches. divided from
  them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most
  recent decade of years (A Rose for Emily)

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A 2 History what

• Kinds -- Official history and personal histories
  (biography, memoir, anecdote, diary, etc.) grand
  narrative, small narrative
• Negative views of history --
• Shes history.
• The past is passé, gone forever.
• We should put the past behind us and move
  forward.
• History repeats itself. ?? progressive
• Traditional view linear view history as a
  route we take in life.

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A 2 History what (2)

• Personal sense of history
• . . . to the elderly all the past is not a
  diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow
  which no winter ever quite touches. divided from
  them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most
  recent decade of years (A Rose for Emily)

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Example 1 Time in a Bottle

• The song
• Please do a close analysis of the song, both the
  lyrics and the music. What does it say and how
  does it say it? Are there contradictions and
  tensions in this song?
• How is it similar to or different from the quote
  from A Rose for Emily?

Jim Croce, Died September 20, 1973 Does it
matter who writes the song?
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Example 2 The Dream Before

• The song the last part
• History is a pile of debris And the angel wants
  to go back and fix things  To repair the things
  that have been broken But there is a storm
  blowing from Paradise  And the storm keeps
  blowing the angel backwards into the future And
  this storm, this storm  is called  Progress.

Laurie Anderson
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Example 2 The Dream Before

• How does the song deal with the fairy tale of
  Hansel and Gretel?
• They live in a life not as heroic and adventurous
  as their life in the fairy tale.
• Hansel
• 1) attached to the witch (why?)
• 2) Expresses Walter Benjamins view of history.

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Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus"
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Benjamin on Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus"

• An angel looking as though he is about to move
  away from something he is fixedly contemplating.
  His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his
  wings are spread. This is how one pictures the
  angel of history. His face is turned toward the
  past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he
  sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
  wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of
  his feet.

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Benjamin on Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus"

• The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
  and make whole what has been smashed. . . . But a
  storm is blowing from Paradise . . .
  irresistibly propels him into the future to which
  his back is turned, This storm is what we call
  progress. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the
  Philosophy of History

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Q3 History why and how?

• Why do we write and read histories? To record
  events only? What are the functions of history?
  
• To serve their functions, how are histories
  told?

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Example 1 -- ????????

• ??????,???????????????,??????,?????????????????
  ????,????????????????????????,??????,???????????,?
  ????????,???????????????,???????,????????,??????,
  ?????????????????,?????????????????,??????????,???
  ?????????,????,??????????,???????????????,????????
  ?????

Source http//contest.ks.edu.tw/7Etaiwan/main.ht
m
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Example 1 Official/National History

• Exact dates, numbers and facts
• Only the names of VIPs His-story
• General avoiding and/or erasing details
• Suggesting progress

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Example 2 My Grandmother Ironed the King's
Shirts

• 1999 Torill Kove
• How is this animation different from an official
  story of Norway? Pay attention, again, to its
  form and content.

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Example 2 My Grandmother Ironed the King's
Shirts

• Content
• Characterization the grandmother a royalist and
  a professional shirt-presser
• history She no longer approved.
• Form
• child-like drawing
• digressions ? ice-skating dancer, the ending.
• language unemployed royals.

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For your reference

• ?????????(Oslo)
• 1905, separated from The Bernadottes the union
  between Sweden and Norway to be a separate
  nation.
• On 18 November, 1905, the solemn election of
  Prince Carl as king of Norway took place in the
  Storting, taking the name of Haakon the seventh.
• The Royan family of Norway http//www.kongehuset.
  no/default.asp?langeng

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For your reference (2)

• When the Norwegian forces in Northern Norway
  capitulated after two months of fighting in June
  1940, the king, prime minister and government
  evacuated to Great Britain. Throughout the war
  years, Norway retained a operating government in
  exile. And as the years passed by, the number of
  Norwegian refugees abroad grew to some 80.000.
• (source http//home.online.no/gestrom/history/no
  rartxt.htm )

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Example 3 Two Villages

• What is the use of numbers here?
• How are the two passages with numbers in contrast
  with the other two about Mr. Tat and Mr. Tuong.

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For your reference Historythe use of hard facts
and photos e.g. Paul Hardcastle '19

• In a newscasters voice "In world war two the
  average age of the combat soldier was twenty six.
  In Vietnam he was nineteen. I-I-I-I-In Vietnam he
  was nineteen. N-n-n-n-nineteen."

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For your reference Vietnam War

• History the country divided in 1954 the U.S.s
  involvement since around 1955 support forces
  arriving since 1961, intense bombing since 1965,
  withdrawal since 1969, and the total withdrawal
  in 1973, a few months after a ceasefire was
  signed in Jan. The fall of Saigon in May 1975.

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For your reference Vietnam War

• Atrocities
• A. American side
• 58,148 dead, 270,000 injured
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Agent Orange
• Vietnamese side
• dead (from both sides) more than 4,000,000
  civilians and soldiers10 of the entire
  population
• displaced 9,000 out of 15,000 villages
• destroyed farmland, forest, farm animals all
  six of the industrial cities in the North
• affected 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans,
  181,000 disabled people, 1 million widows

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Example 4 Time Travel e.g. Somewhere in Time
(1980)

• Plot
• Chicago playwright Richard Collier goes back in
  time 60 years to find the love (Elise McKenna)
  hes been missing all his life. Richard --
• 1978 ? 1912
• Location Mackinac Island, Michigan, the Grand
  Hotel

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Example 2 Time Travel e.g. Somewhere in Time
(1980)

• Method of Time Travel (clip 4)
• Sources Jack Finney, a science fiction writer
• -- location a hotel
• -- erase the traces of the present
• -- hypnotize ones mind
• how Richard does it (clip 5)

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Example 2 Time Travel e.g. Somewhere in Time
(1980)

• Who determines their destiny?
• A gold watch, the photo as mementos? destiny?
• Richards crisis in life?
• The producer (clip 8)
• What is eternal love?

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Example 2 Somewhere in Time (1980) -- a
reinterpretation

• Time travel -- Can we really travel in time?
• time travel can get us into 1) a never-ending
  loop
• 2) multiple time line.
• 2. Isnt realistic novel or historical tales
  like this?

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Example 2 Somewhere in Time (1980) -- a
reinterpretation (2)

• 3. History and fixation in history --
• Other possibilities
• -- There could be two Richards
• -- It could all be Richards fantasy, made with
  the gold watch and the photo. (It could be
  another woman that gave Richard the watch.)
• In the end, its either Richard or Elise, or
  both, who is fixated by their memory or
  immobilized by their traumatic experience, and
  thus seeks to perpetuate it (in life and in
  death).

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A 2 History why and how?

• Purposes
• a memento to keep (and past to
  immortalize), and to be fixated by, ? Somewhere
  in Time
• -- sense-making, legitimating ?.grandmother
  
• -- re-interpretation ? relating it to our
  present world and selves.
• Cannot be re-presenting the past histories have
  to be fictions, or constructions.

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Q 4 History and Identity

• History and Identity How does History/histories
  shape our identities?
• And how do we establish/construct our identities
  through telling stories?

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About our Course

1. Identity ? History ? History and Literature
2. Identity and (History of) colonialism and racism
   
3. History as influenced by Postmodernism
4. Identity as influenced by Globalization and Trauma