{"id":61,"date":"2017-03-13T18:43:42","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T01:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/?p=61"},"modified":"2017-03-16T12:55:42","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T19:55:42","slug":"the-work-of-memory-posts-due-mon-mar-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/2017\/03\/13\/the-work-of-memory-posts-due-mon-mar-20\/","title":{"rendered":"The Work of Memory (posts due Mon Mar 20)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, as always, you can choose your own text and topic to studying relation to the issues, concepts, and frameworks we\u2019ve taken up in ASTU. Remember that I\u2019m looking for posts to develop analytical discussions of these texts, using specific examples to illustrate the abstractions that you\u2019re engaging, and linking to + citing all your sources. You could blog about the materials you\u2019re working on in the archives, or any of the archival readings or sites we\u2019ve been studying as a class; this article<\/a>, about a recent life narrative by an IRS survivor, Arthur Bear Chief, picks up on our discussions not just of the TRC and archives, but of the work of auto\/biography in bearing witness and the need to speak so that his experiences, and those of others, will be remembered. This article<\/a>\u00a0might be of interest, too: it\u00a0discusses a writer’s encounters\u00a0with a woman’s WWII diary kept in the Mass Observation archives and how\u00a0the\u00a0ordinary beauty of this diary and its observations on daily life inspired her to write a novel based on it. (You yourselves don’t have time to write novels based on the archives for your projects! But maybe later.)<\/p>\n

You can write about Diamond Grill<\/em> or you might also take up topics about or inspired by Diamond Grill<\/em>: e.g., biotexts or food memoirs or High Muck-a-Muck<\/a> or the contemporary Canadian long poem<\/a> or poems by on prison walls<\/a> by Chinese immigrants, etc. You could extend our discussion of The Race Card Project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another direction inspired by our discussions of the complicated genealogy of the book would be to think more about Diamond Grill <\/em>as a family memoir. Wah (Jr) is not, of course, writing in a vacuum but, as we\u2019ve discussed, inscribing a relational story. As he acknowledges, he\u2019s writing about his family and community. In an essay<\/a> on The Conversation <\/em>(a website in which scholars write for a general public, just like you will in your archives projects), sociologist Ashley Barnwell considers the ethics of the family memoir, looking at several instances of life narratives in which family members who were represented by these texts rejected, resented, or publicly protested the versions of the family that the author produced. Not only is Barnwell\u2019s analysis relevant to our discussions, it\u2019s also a cross-disciplinary encounter in action: how a sociologist reads life narratives (vs our readings as literary and cultural studies scholars). You could introduce and respond to her ideas by thinking about these issues in relation to Wah\u2019s text or other life narratives.<\/p>\n

ETA: I came across this photography project<\/a>, in which the artist represents depression through auto\/photography: “what if I tried on lives like I try on dresses,” she asks. This study connects in a number of conceptual ways to our course but also to our discussions of the visual, such as in HONY.<\/p>\n

Posts are due Monday March 20, at noon. Comments are due Tuesday<\/strong>, March 21 @ 9:30 am. Please add comments to this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, as always, you can choose your own text and topic to studying relation to the issues, concepts, and frameworks we\u2019ve taken up in ASTU. Remember that I\u2019m looking for posts to develop analytical discussions of these texts, using … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18775,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18775"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/astug012016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}