Unforgettable fires

Woodstock West

Juli:

I couldn’t help but think of your post this evening as I passed Buchtel Memorial Tower, all that’s left of Buchtel Chapel, named for Chancellor (and Governor) Henry Augustus Buchtel, dedicated upon its completion in 1917 to the memory of the veterans of WWI, which burned down in 1983, and now stands beside the Holocaust Memorial Social Action Site, dedicated in 2010 to educating for social consciousness and social justice in memory of Jewish lives lost to the Holocaust (and whose shape is intended to resemble an eternal flame), both of which sit adjacent to Carnegie Green, the as yet unremarked site of Woodstock West, the 1970 encampment that started when students who'd gathered to mourn the protesters killed at Kent State and to protest Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, at first chanting “Burn! Burn!” but then “Build, not burn,” built a tent city, home to an occupation and a freeform teach-in (i.e., what Geoffrey Sirc would call a happening), which lasted in defiance of administration and the police for a few weeks, but was abandoned after the successor to Chancellor Buchtel called upon the successor to Governor Buchtel to call in the National Guard.

All of which is to say that I’m terribly intrigued by the idea of a class organized around the composition of memory. And I especially like the idea that the organizing topos will be remembering and forgetting. That dyad, it seems to me, frames memory in an inherently political hence rhetorical way, and it sets up questions about a whole range of subjects that I think would be interesting and accessible to students. Indeed, some of them physically accessible, right beside our building.

It’s the historical questions that interest me most, the questions about the composition of public memory. I enjoyed Gregory Clark’s Burkean take on the memory embedded in landscapes. I’m also a fan of Kendall Phillips’s work, especially the Public Memory Project, a partnership between Syracuse University and the city of Syracuse. And my old Madison pal Mike Bernard-Donals has a very interesting book about representations and remembrances of the Holocaust (which, like your class description, takes remembering/forgetting as it topos).

But, more to our point here, I think that the historical dimension of rhetorical studies is something we could profitably explore in thinking about ways to enlarge and rejuvenate the curriculum. I know that you’ve been thinking about creating a class (an 1133?) about archival research, and Rob has had his students do archival work, too. That’s really promising, I think. And I wonder what other forms rhetorical history, public memory studies, etc., might take in our classes. My “Thinking in Public” course sketch is one example of an historically oriented course. I can think of some cool civic engagement projects along these lines, too. But I’d really be interested in talking about about ways that the whole WRIT sequence could be reimagined by foregrounding the historical dimension of rhetorical knowledge that’s already at least implicitly there.

(Oh, and by the way: Sheila Schroeder from Media, Film, and Journalism has been working on a documentary about Woodstock West. Sheila’s quite wonderful.)