As a communication scholar, Sturken writes her work in a quite different way compared with paper we read before in class. Dr. Luger suggested that what Sturken does is to develop her own field rather than explores the works of others’ and the same time look at cultural products. Other than a general comparison, I am interested in making a detailed connection between Sturken, and what we studied before, Chute and Bolton.
What we’ve learned before, Chute and Bolton, their papers are based on a particular book. They focuse on one specific points to develop deeper discussions, while Sturken’s attention is on cultural event as a communication scholar. She mainly talks about Vietnam War and the AIDS Epidemic to draw out the relationship between cultural memory and personal memory and history.
I try to make a comparison between Sturken and Chute first, who both argue about traumas in memory. Chute makes her point mainly focused on the personal memory of traumas that she discusses the way how Satrapi uses complex visualizations in graphic works to characterize recent trauma theory, just as what she cites in her paper. She analyses the use of black and white and the children’s perspective in order to make the trauma more deeply represented to the audience, while Sturken tends to emphasize how the trauma in personal memory become collective memory to be the cultural memory and how the personal memory of trauma is influenced by the cultural memory formed after.
When compared with Bolton, there comes something different. What Bolton focuses is not trauma in memory but the way Ondaatje combines historical fact and creative fiction to form “historiographic metafiction”, which is defined by Linda Hatcheon. Bolton’s analysis helps the audience to develop that Ondaatje’s work is not only history or creation of memory but consists both of them. I suppose that the cultural memory is a kind of similar with the historiographic metafiction that cultural memory is also not simply the historical discourse or “cultural products and cultural meanings”, instead is the combination of them. There is no either or relationship but a “both” relationship. I think we can use the same way to look at how should we define “cultural memory”.
What Sturken mentions about the psychologist Sigmund Freud also reminds me of my psychology class. We also discussed in the lecture that Freud is the first one to believe mind that operates outside awareness, the unconsciousness, also plays an important role in memory. However, Freud is argued by other psychologists later that unconsciousness and consciousness should be put together in order to figure out the behaviour and mind of human beings. It also suggests me not to separate the idea of cultural memory, personal memory and history.
