This project aims at addressing those issues that derive from an understanding of the interplay between memory and forgetfulness in the construction of personal as well as cultural memory. Further emphasis will also be placed on the study of the negative of memory through the modalities of forgetting, amnesia, amnesty, forgiveness, censorship, trauma, and censorship. Literature will not only be considered at the heart of a wider prospect – in which it will stand as a decisive form in the awareness of how personal, collective, and cultural identities are (trans)formed, (re)negotiated and go under a permanent process of fundamental revision, but it will also be viewed as a field relating to several other fields, mainly those of law, psychoanalysis, neurology, and social history. This web of relations will try to locate memory and testimony in the wider context of forms of forgetting, to study in further detail how personal and social memory is conditioned by so many forms that forgetfulness may take, and indeed takes. Some of these ways of forgetting are socially legitimized, other not; some of them have links to law, other to philosophy or religion, still others with science. We will put literature into the map of these forms of forgetting, and understand how the negative of memory is also a way of shaping memory itself.
This Project began in 2005, fostered by the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. We have been able to publish two books in the meantime, and also to organize one main international conference (100 participants), held in Lisbon, around that main topic. But it became clear, as the project developed itself, that the 1755 Earthquake presented the possibility to study questions where literature bordered ethics, or psychoanalysis, or even scientific discourse. The question of memory and testimony, a fundamental question to understand the role of literature, art and philosophy in the 20th Century, progressively presented itself as evolving from the project around the Lisbon Earthquake. This was perhaps the main achievement of this project: its gradual fostering, beginning with a less wider scope and ending in a group reflection, still undergoing, around the problems and questions mentioned.
Among the main achievements of the Group one should also mention the wide international echoes, visible in international publications (some already appeared, other forthcoming), as well as in invitations to talk on the subject, or the relations between it and memory issues, in different Universities, in Europe and the US.
The main objective of MORPHE for the near future will be the assembly of an application either to Framework Programme 7, or to a national applicatin to FCT, in cooperation with the Universities of Utrecht (Ann Rigney), Technical University Berlin (Sigrid Weigel), Bologna (Roberto Vecchi) and UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil (Márcio Seligmann-Silva). All prospective partners have agreed to collaborate in this project, which will be coordinated by Lisbon. To this aim, several international meetings and different kind of publications are envisaged for the period 2007-2010.
The project will also develop a collaboration with the Secondary School System in Portugal. We will try to devise an experimental project in which a full cooperation between research and teaching will take place, as well as a cooperation between University and the educational system at large. This is a particularly important aspect of MORPHE, since it seems quite clear that all research in memory and literature should also take into account how well, or how bad, cultural memory is being dealt with by the younger generations.
Several conferences are already under way in this project: the Colloquium on Law and Literature, "Mundos em Diálogo", in 19 and 20 February 2008 (in collaboration with the Faculty of Law, of Universidade Nova de Lisboa); the colloqium on "Memória da Sabedoria", in collaboration with the Centre for Classical Studies, in February 2009; and the colloquium "Memory, Testimony, and Forgetfulness" (ACT20), November 2008.
We also fully intend to publish the results of these activities, making them known to a wider public other than that already involved in their concretization.
As a natural follow up of the colloquium on Law and Literature, a project will be launched in collaboration with the Faculty of Law (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). We intend to develop issues related to the representation of Law, justice, and human rights, in nineteen-century literature.
