Preserving the Past: Oral History in Theory and Practice
(Creative Writing)
Instructors:
Myrna Katz Frommer
Myrna.Frommer@Dartmouth.EDU
Harvey Frommer
Harvey.Frommer@Dartmouth.EDU
Schedule:
Location:
Description:
This course will explore the theoretical implications, practical applications, and literary dimensions of oral history. Through reading and discussion, students will be exposed to a variety of oral histories and evaluate the uses of individual and/or collective memory as a means of documenting, understanding, and appreciating the past. Oral history will be examined as a literary genre with consideration of how the oral historian becomes a creative writer whose work relies almost wholly on the voices of those interviewed. The special demands of oral biography will be considered as well.
Issues to be addressed include: the place of oral history -- by nature personal and subjective -- in the larger historical framework; the changes demanded by a shift in medium as the oral historian transfers taped commentary to print; the role of the oral historian/oral biographer as re-caster and re-arranger of memory.
Selected oral histories will be contrasted with and compared to traditional historical accounts of similar events, as well as to one another as regards purpose, methodology, style, and literary effectiveness. The roles and responsibilities of the practitioner as interviewer, archivist, historian, biographer, and artist will be examined and critiqued. A work of communication theory will be read for insights into the kinds of cultural mindsets orality fosters as opposed to literacy.
Each student will produce an oral history project with 6-12 voices on a cultural, institutional, local, familial, personal, or event-based topic. Instruction and guidance will be given by the professors in weekly one-on-one meetings as the student goes through the process of selecting a theme and subjects to interview, preparing for and conducting interviews, transcribing and editing taped materials, and fashioning from them the final work. Through discussing their projects in the Workshop component of the course, students will be able to network and benefit from feedback.
REQUIRED READING
- Frommer, Myrna Katz and Harvey. It Happened in Manhattan: An Oral History of Life in the City During the Mid-Twentieth Century. N.Y.: Berkley, 2001
- Hampton, Henry and Fayer, Steve. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. N.Y.: Bantam, 1990.
- Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.
- Miller, Merle. Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman. N.Y.: Berkley, 1984.
- Terkel, Studs. The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two. N.Y.: Ballantine, 1984.
- The MALS Oral History Reader, Volume IV
RECOMMENDED READING
- Cook, Taya Haruko and Theodore F. Japan at War: An Oral History. N.Y.: New Press, 1993.
- Frommer, Myrna Katz, Always Up Front: the Memoirs of Helen Fried Kirshblum Goldstein, Jerusalem: Gefen, 2005.
- Frommer, Myrna Katz and Harvey. It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. N.Y.: Harcourt Brace, 1993, 1995; Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
- Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Simon & Schuster, Inc.. 2005.
- Grele, Ronald J. Envelopes of Sound: the Art of Oral History. Chicago: Precedent 1985.
- Lee, Joann Faung Jean. Asian Americans. N.Y.: The New Press, 1992.
- Ong,Walter J. From Orality to Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. N.Y.:Routledge 1982.
- Perks, Robert and Thomson, Alstair. The Oral History Reader. N.Y.: Routledge, 1998.
- Ritter, Lawrence S. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. N.Y.: Morrow, 1992.
- Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. Houghton Mifflin Co. 2005.
- Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. N.Y.: Ballantine, 1986.
- The MALS Oral History Reader, Volumes I-III
- Thompson Paul. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2000
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