Overview
How do we use surviving material to tell the story of a life? What influences the choices we make to select some sources and discard others? How do individual lives entwine with larger historical movements? And how might archives—either physical or virtual—enable us, through telling life-stories, to do memory work that is relevant to the present day?
With this in mind, this module examines the intersections between archival materials, historical memory, and the writing of biography. It takes as a subject an archive in Singapore which has not been extensively used. In our first offering of the module, we will examine the Lucien Wang archive at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.
The primary goal of the module is to encourage intellectual exploration of the concepts outlined above. We will thus study theoretical work on archives and biography, and critically examine biographical work in different media, before producing biographical work of their own. However, we will also spend time in the archive, doing practical work that acquaints us with the physical nature of the archive itself.
Outline Schedule
Note that while the overall workload is similar to a regular USP module, we will need to visit the archive outside classroom time.
Unit 1 Introduction (2 weeks)
Here the module is introduced, we'll visit the archive, and we'll explore historical background to the archive and the individual represented in it
Unit 2. Archives (4 weeks)
This unit is split into two sections. In the first two weeks, you will have classroom sessions in which you discuss scholarly work on history, memory, and archives. The reading is structured so that it begins with general questions about history and memory and narrows down to concrete discussion of archives in Singapore. In the second two weeks you will do cataloguing and other work in the archive itself.
Unit 3 Biography, Narrative and Memory (7 weeks)
Here you will first read academic and other texts on the practice of writing biography and history, and then move to considering a number of texts in different media which have biographical elements. At the same time, you will work on individual projects which will be presented to class in the last week.
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