Hello all and welcome to the student blog for the Memory and Literature in a Globalised Culture course at UCL and Aarhus University.
Hopefully the invitations to participate in this blog got through - if you haven't received an email, please contact me or write in the forum on Moodle.
The conference this monday was very interesting and thankfully Jakob and Elena fought their way through the snow so we were able to engage in some enlightening discussions on sites of memory.
One of the examples from mondays discussion was 'Den Gamle By' (The Old City) in Århus, which I think displays some of the ideas also found in 'England, England'. A lot of other examples were mentioned in the discussion and I can't 'remember' them all, so feel free to post them in this forum, to help us all create our own collective memory and to help us remember the inspiring spring semester spent online.
Hello.
ReplyDeleteGood work setting up the blog, Jacob.
Svend Erik made an interesting comment on the reconstruction of the good old days, as seen in 'Den Gamle By'. To make it really 'authentic', it would have to be dangerous: disorder, criminals, superstition, ill-behaved people, and, besides, you would need rubbish and excrements in the streets. But, as he said, no-one would stand the smell of the old days. The tourists wouldn't want to spend their money there.
The same goes for England England. The more authentic Dr. Johnson tries to be, i.e. melancholic, moody, ill-mannered, abusive, the more the guests complain about him, saying that this is not wat they paid, and that they did not get they their money's worth. They prefer, instead, a neat, politically correct Dr. Johnson, that does not challenge contemporary values.
I'm not sure I agree that the 'really authentic' would keep people from coming to certain sites of memory / museums / theme parks or whatever we should call it. If you assume that these various sites are clean and harmless places where nothing must be offensive or discomforting then they obviously fit quite well into the commercial or market-driven conditions of tourism. But not all such sites attract tourists solely with a commercial purpose.
ReplyDeleteIf 'Den Gamle By' started spreading manure in the streets and offered people a chance to get beaten up by 'authentic' medieval thugs I still think they might attract tourists - just of a different kind than before. One example of this is the Viking week mentioned by Lene. And a more radical example could be the musical festival held each year at Roskilde in Denmark. Does Roskilde not attract people especially because of the 'dirtyness' and whole 'authentic' atmosphere of being a bit more 'primal' for a whole week?
http://www.roskilde-festival.dk/