Memory and the Senses II

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Drawing on insights from sensory, visual, and sound studies, the second roundtable in this stream traces how the senses trigger or preserve memories in literature and culture; how they shape, alter, or distort history; and how they are curated to memorialize events in Russian and East European culture. The participants will work across literature, memoir, film, photography, and media to consider various sensory configurations: sight/color, vision/motion/emotion, perfume/stench, sound/kinesthesia, and tastes/smells/textures. Aaron Retish will first examine visual representations of Russia in National Geographic in the late Imperial and revolutionary period to show how the editors played with memory and time and distorted history as they shaped American perceptions of Russia. Siobhán Seigne will then discuss how Sergei Eisenstein uses violent attraction in the montage scenes from “The Strike” and “Battleship Potemkin” to access emotions tied to traumatic experiences and help re-encode them through ideology. Bodo Mrozek will next historicize olfactory memory in the GDR—from East-West perfumery and pollution to olfactory Ostalgie. Andreea Ritivoi will then explore the public and private sonic regimes of Cold War Romania by juxtaposing political dissident Stelian Tănase's accounts of the secret police with the film "Metronom" and its representations of 1970s Radio Free Europe. Finally, Mykyta Tyshchenko will examine the sensory language that dissidents Valeria Novodvorskaia and Viktor Nekipelov use to articulate memories of involuntary psychiatric treatment and imprisonment in descriptions of tastes, smells, textures, and visceral sensations. To conclude, Polina Dimova will reflect on the sensory memory clinics imagined by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Polina Dimcheva Dimova, U of Denver

Roundtable Speakers

• Bodo Mrozek, Berlin Center for Cold War Studies (Germany)

• Aaron Benyamin Retish, Wayne State U

• Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Carnegie Mellon U

• Siobhán Seigne, Ohio State U

• Mykyta Tyshchenko, Ohio State U