Dream Records as Historical Sources and Literary Narratives

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Dream records and reports have been an object of attention not only by psychoanalysts but also by literary scholars, philosophers, cultural historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, who viewed dreams as legible texts and valid historical evidence. After Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, dreams have been treated as peculiar carries of memory, personal and collective. In our times, historians and literary scholars--Reinhart Koselleck, Peter Burke, George Steiner, and others--have established strategies of analyzing dreams for literature and history. Speaking about “dreams of terror” during the Third Reich, Koselleck went so far as to suggest that dreams “testify to a past reality in a manner which perhaps could not be surpassed by any source.” He also viewed dreams as an analogy of fictional texts. Drawing on these premises, the panel will test various modalities of dream records, both as historical sources and as literary narratives endowed with unique insights into human experience and cultural memory. We will address methodological issues: Which analytical approaches and strategies can be pursued in analyzing dream records?

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Nadja Berkovich, U of Arkansas

Papers

• Ivan Mikhailovich Dolgorukov’s 'Prophetic' Dream, or How Russian Gentry Learned to Dream Sentimentally - Rebecca Gigli, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)

• Dream as the Only Evidence: Samuil Kissin and the Jewish Population in the Front Zone of the Great War - Edward Waysband, U of Pennsylvania

• Awakening and Utopia in Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary - Garris Rogonyan, Smolny Beyond Borders (Germany)

• Spectral Dreamer: Aleksei Remizov’s Dream Journals as Experiments in Metaphysical Communion - Ben Hooyman, Columbia U

Discussant

• Irina Paperno, UC Berkeley