What can we learn from this article about the relationship between scholarship and the "invention of tradition"? How does the ‘institutionalization of forgetting’ engender tradition by manipulating the temporal dimensions of past and present and collapsing them into an a-historical history? How does ‘meaning’ become concretized into objects like ruins and literary fragments, giving ‘reality effect’ to historical narration? Are our ideals and beliefs influenced by the self-evidential power of significance of material objects or are objects always recontextualized and imbued with new meaning? (or both?) Does the process of decontextualization always imply an original context?
I suggest that you read the article extra carefully this week and that you think very carefully about the questions...
Kudos to Elizabeth for being the first to insightfully comment on her own story. As you can see its not a thousands-of-words job. I'm sure you can all manage to do it, before the end of term.
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