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Critical Questions

Critical Questions. Hints: Ask yourself: “What exactly do I want to learn here?” “How does my object help me to learn this?” Ask yourself: “What question am I going to be asking myself when I “read” my primary object? Get started reading, both your primary object and the secondary criticism….

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Critical Questions

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  1. Critical Questions • Hints: • Ask yourself: “What exactly do I want to learn here?” • “How does my object help me to learn this?” • Ask yourself: “What question am I going to be asking myself when I “read” my primary object? • Get started reading, both your primary object and the secondary criticism…

  2. Memory & Forgetting Analyzing the Nation’s Historical Consciousness

  3. Recapping Anderson • “Anti-Foundationalist” • Nation is an “imagined community” (which is not to say that it is a falsehood or a lie) • What is the “style” in which it is imagined? • A “horizontal brotherhood” - a great, anonymous “fraternity” • “A sociological organism” moving through “homogenous, empty time” • Parallel and simultaneous, a “people” amongst other “peoples” • Materialist Historian • What were the conditions that made it possible to “think”/imagine the nation? • Print-capitalism, the newspaper and the novel • Vernacular, popular languages • These conditions produce a “consciousness” of nation

  4. Anderson’s “Memory and Forgetting” • Extends this line of inquiry into the line of inquiry past the moment of nationalism’s inception, into the 19th C. “Hence, for the members of what we might call ‘second-generation’ nationalist movements, those which developed in Europe between 1815 to 1850, and also for the generation that inherited the independent national states of the Americas, it was no longer possible to ‘recapture/The first fine careless rapture’ of their revolutionary predecessors. For different reasons and with different consequences, the two groups thus began the process of reading nationalism genealogically – as the expression of an historical tradition of serial continuity.” (195)

  5. Anderson’s “Memory and Forgetting” • What is the “style” in which nation is imagined? • Revolutionary nationalists – a “break” with the past and a “rupture” in history • 19th C nationalists • National character/identity as an “inheritance,” “lineage,” or “genealogy” • Nationalism as the “awakening” of something that was already inherent in “the people”

  6. Anderson’s “Memory and Forgetting” • What were the conditions that made it possible to “think”/imagine the nation (in this way)? • Cultural imagination (again) – Anderson (who is not a literary scholar) turns to novels to show how “fraternity” and “national identity” were figured in terms of sequence and continuity with the pre-national past • History/historiography! – “a vast pedagogical industry” which encourages a particular kind of “remembrance/forgetting” • National consciousness becomes a consciousness of history

  7. Anderson’s “Memory and Forgetting” …we become aware of a systematic historiographical campaign, deployed by the state mainly through the state’s school system, to ‘remind’ every young Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which are now inscribed as ‘family history. Having to have “already forgotten” tragedies of which one needs unceasingly to be “reminded” turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies. (201)

  8. Anderson’s “Memory and Forgetting” All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives. (204) As it is with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity – the product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century – engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity.’ (205)

  9. Anderson’s “Memory and Forgetting” From Braudel’s remorselessly accumulating cemeteries, however, the nation’s biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as ‘our own.’ (206)

  10. The House of Seven Gables • Hawthorne (1804-1864) was certainly one of these “second generation” nationalists • THoSGwas published in 1851, during this subtle shift in “national consciousness” that Anderson refers to in “Memory and Forgetting” • I would like for us to think about how Hawthorne is both emerging out of this historical context AND commenting on it, intervening in it, or critiquing it.

  11. The House of Seven Gables • Look at “The Author’s Preface” and “The Old Pyncheon Family” for quotes that evoke themes of history, lineage, continuity, memory... • Formulate some initial observations and analysis of these quotes to contribute to discussion. • Particularly, we should be looking for how these nationalist frameworks connect to the more obvious themes of the novel – the house, the family, etc

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