Remembering and forgetting, evoking and overlooking: they are parts of our everyday life, as well as practices that cement cultures, traditions, and our ideas of self. This course explores the connections between literature and memory. It looks at a period of particular global conflict over memory, when after the end of World War II, the world moves into the decades of the Cold War. We ask how literature participates in the construction of memory and how it sheds light on different sorts of vulnerability and abuses of memory. In what different roles does literature put us as readers in order to compel us to keep memory alive, participate in its construction, or be tempted into forgetfulness? Through literary and theoretical texts, we will discuss the role of literature in narrating tragic and overwhelming experiences, which hardly find their place in language. We will look at the ways in which past and its evocation can be––deliberately or not––distorted, censored, and used for political aims. And we will reflect on everyday practices of trying to keep memory alive, or trying to forget.