creative writing school
Module 2: Slowness
structure
Introduction
Theory:
Share your text with us
Theory:
- Philosophy
- Psychology
- Aby Warburg: Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929)
- Monique Wittig: Les Guérillères (1969)
Share your text with us
introduction
Welcome to this lesson on collective memory.
Memory is never only personal. Even the most intimate memory is crossed by larger forces: family narratives, national myths, inherited silences, rituals, images, songs, political events, religious gestures, schoolbooks, monuments, jokes, wounds, forbidden words. We remember from inside a world that has already remembered before us.
Collective memory is not a stable container of shared truths. It is a battlefield.
What is preserved?
What is erased?
Who is allowed to remember publicly?
Whose pain becomes history, and whose remains anecdote, shame, folklore, or silence?
This is why collective memory cannot be approached innocently. It is not only about belonging. It is also about power. Communities build themselves through stories, but also through exclusions. Nations repeat certain memories until they become identity, while other events are pushed aside, simplified, aestheticized, or made unspeakable. Families do the same. Institutions do the same. Art history does the same.
In this lesson, we will approach collective memory as artistic material, as a living structure that shapes language, imagination, identity, and form. We will look at how memory circulates through bodies, images, myths, gestures, repetitions, inherited fears, collective desires, and cultural symbols. We will ask how writing can work with what is not individually lived but still somehow carried.
Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères offers one possible direction. The book builds a counter-memory. It breaks the inherited narratives through which women, bodies, violence, collectivity, and language have been represented. Wittig constructs another symbolic order. Another mythology. Another grammar of struggle and relation. Collective memory becomes here a weapon to rewrite the conditions of what can be imagined.
Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas opens another path. His atlas does not organize memory through chronology, but through association. A hand position, a fold of fabric, a posture, a figure of grief or ecstasy can reappear across centuries. Memory migrates. It repeats. It changes costume. It survives in forms that do not always announce themselves as memory.
Together, Wittig and Warburg allow us to think collective memory beyond conventional storytelling.
One works through revolt, language, and the invention of new collective myths.
The other through montage, visual association, and the strange persistence of images across time.
For writing, this opens an important question: how do we work with myths, family stories, historical wounds, cultural symbols, and collective images without turning them into decoration? How do we avoid speaking in the name of a group, while still acknowledging that we are shaped by histories larger than ourselves?
This lesson invites you to write from that tension.
Between the personal and the inherited.
Between memory and invention.
Between archive and myth.
Between what was transmitted and what must be transformed.
The objective is to ask what writing can do with these materials: preserve them, disturb them, reassemble them, contaminate them, or finally give them another form.
Memory is never only personal. Even the most intimate memory is crossed by larger forces: family narratives, national myths, inherited silences, rituals, images, songs, political events, religious gestures, schoolbooks, monuments, jokes, wounds, forbidden words. We remember from inside a world that has already remembered before us.
Collective memory is not a stable container of shared truths. It is a battlefield.
What is preserved?
What is erased?
Who is allowed to remember publicly?
Whose pain becomes history, and whose remains anecdote, shame, folklore, or silence?
This is why collective memory cannot be approached innocently. It is not only about belonging. It is also about power. Communities build themselves through stories, but also through exclusions. Nations repeat certain memories until they become identity, while other events are pushed aside, simplified, aestheticized, or made unspeakable. Families do the same. Institutions do the same. Art history does the same.
In this lesson, we will approach collective memory as artistic material, as a living structure that shapes language, imagination, identity, and form. We will look at how memory circulates through bodies, images, myths, gestures, repetitions, inherited fears, collective desires, and cultural symbols. We will ask how writing can work with what is not individually lived but still somehow carried.
Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères offers one possible direction. The book builds a counter-memory. It breaks the inherited narratives through which women, bodies, violence, collectivity, and language have been represented. Wittig constructs another symbolic order. Another mythology. Another grammar of struggle and relation. Collective memory becomes here a weapon to rewrite the conditions of what can be imagined.
Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas opens another path. His atlas does not organize memory through chronology, but through association. A hand position, a fold of fabric, a posture, a figure of grief or ecstasy can reappear across centuries. Memory migrates. It repeats. It changes costume. It survives in forms that do not always announce themselves as memory.
Together, Wittig and Warburg allow us to think collective memory beyond conventional storytelling.
One works through revolt, language, and the invention of new collective myths.
The other through montage, visual association, and the strange persistence of images across time.
For writing, this opens an important question: how do we work with myths, family stories, historical wounds, cultural symbols, and collective images without turning them into decoration? How do we avoid speaking in the name of a group, while still acknowledging that we are shaped by histories larger than ourselves?
This lesson invites you to write from that tension.
Between the personal and the inherited.
Between memory and invention.
Between archive and myth.
Between what was transmitted and what must be transformed.
The objective is to ask what writing can do with these materials: preserve them, disturb them, reassemble them, contaminate them, or finally give them another form.
theory
Philosophical Perspectives
Collective memory is different from personal memory because it does not belong to one person. It circulates between people. It is passed through stories, rituals, monuments, family myths, national holidays, schoolbooks, songs, images, gestures, silences. It can survive across generations, even when nobody remembers its origin clearly anymore.
But collective memory is not fixed.
Each present reshapes the past it needs.
In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur shows that memory is never a pure return to what happened. Memory is always interpreted, narrated, organized. There is no memory without framing. A community does not only remember the past; it tells the past in a certain way. And this way of telling has consequences. It can create belonging, but it can also produce blindness.
A collective story can hold people together.
It can also protect a lie.
Jacques Derrida, in Archive Fever, pushes this further. The archive is not neutral. To archive something is to give it a place, a status, an authority. But every archive also produces an outside. If one version becomes preserved, another may disappear. If one voice becomes official, another may remain informal, private, invisible, or illegitimate.
This is why collective memory is deeply connected to power. And the question can be: who had the power to decide what memory looks like?
Who was allowed to speak? Who was recorded? Who was believed? Who remained a footnote, a rumour, a family secret, a body without document, a story without archive?
Hannah Arendt brings the question into public life. For Arendt, the world we share is built through speech, action, and appearance in public space. The stories we tell about the past shape how we judge, how we act, and how we imagine living together. Collective memory is therefore political because it shapes the common world.
If a society cannot remember certain violences, it cannot fully understand its present.
If a family cannot name certain wounds, they return in other forms.
If a community only remembers itself as innocent, it becomes unable to transform.
For writing, collective memory is powerful because it gives depth to the personal. A single image, sentence, object, or family story may carry much more than individual experience. It may contain migration, class, gender, religion, war, colonial history, silence, shame, survival, resistance.
The task is to listen to what has been transmitted through you. To ask what stories you inherited before you could choose them. To notice which memories were repeated, which were forbidden, which were turned into myth, and which survived only as atmosphere.
Collective memory is material.
It enters writing through repetition, omission, inherited language, family legends, public rituals, cultural images, gestures, and gaps.
And sometimes the most important part of collective memory is not what is remembered clearly, but what a group has learned not to say.
But collective memory is not fixed.
Each present reshapes the past it needs.
In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur shows that memory is never a pure return to what happened. Memory is always interpreted, narrated, organized. There is no memory without framing. A community does not only remember the past; it tells the past in a certain way. And this way of telling has consequences. It can create belonging, but it can also produce blindness.
A collective story can hold people together.
It can also protect a lie.
Jacques Derrida, in Archive Fever, pushes this further. The archive is not neutral. To archive something is to give it a place, a status, an authority. But every archive also produces an outside. If one version becomes preserved, another may disappear. If one voice becomes official, another may remain informal, private, invisible, or illegitimate.
This is why collective memory is deeply connected to power. And the question can be: who had the power to decide what memory looks like?
Who was allowed to speak? Who was recorded? Who was believed? Who remained a footnote, a rumour, a family secret, a body without document, a story without archive?
Hannah Arendt brings the question into public life. For Arendt, the world we share is built through speech, action, and appearance in public space. The stories we tell about the past shape how we judge, how we act, and how we imagine living together. Collective memory is therefore political because it shapes the common world.
If a society cannot remember certain violences, it cannot fully understand its present.
If a family cannot name certain wounds, they return in other forms.
If a community only remembers itself as innocent, it becomes unable to transform.
For writing, collective memory is powerful because it gives depth to the personal. A single image, sentence, object, or family story may carry much more than individual experience. It may contain migration, class, gender, religion, war, colonial history, silence, shame, survival, resistance.
The task is to listen to what has been transmitted through you. To ask what stories you inherited before you could choose them. To notice which memories were repeated, which were forbidden, which were turned into myth, and which survived only as atmosphere.
Collective memory is material.
It enters writing through repetition, omission, inherited language, family legends, public rituals, cultural images, gestures, and gaps.
And sometimes the most important part of collective memory is not what is remembered clearly, but what a group has learned not to say.
Psychological Perspectives
Psychology reminds us that memory is not a recording device. We do not store the past and then retrieve it intact. We rebuild it.
Each time we remember, we reorganize. We select details, connect them, simplify them, protect ourselves from certain parts, exaggerate others, and give the past a form that can be carried in the present.
Frederic Bartlett called this reconstructive memory. For him, memory is shaped by schemas: internal frames that help us organize experience. We remember through what already exists in us — cultural habits, expectations, beliefs, fears, inherited images. This means memory is never only about what happened. It is also about the structure through which we are able to understand what happened.
Collective memory works in a similar way, but at the level of the group. A family, a community, a nation, or a religious group does not remember everything. It reconstructs the past according to what it needs to maintain its identity. Some events become central. Others become secondary. Some are repeated so many times that they become almost sacred. Others disappear, not because they did not matter, but because the group has no place for them.
Maurice Halbwachs gives us an important tool here: memory is always socially framed. Even personal memories are shaped by the groups we belong to. We remember inside language, inside family narratives, inside national histories, inside rituals, inside what has been named and what has remained forbidden.
This means that a memory can belong to us and still not be entirely ours.
Narratives create belonging, but they also create limits. They tell members of the group what can be remembered, how it should be remembered, and what emotional position should accompany it: grief, loyalty, shame, anger, nostalgia, gratitude, silence. Collective memory therefore plays a powerful role in identity formation.
Groups do not only ask, “What happened to us?”
They ask, often unconsciously:
Who are we because of what happened?
This is why collective memory can strengthen solidarity, but it can also feed conflict. When a group becomes attached to one fixed version of the past, memory can harden into mythology. Complexity becomes betrayal. Doubt becomes disloyalty. Other perspectives become threats.
For writing, this is extremely important.
When you write from collective memory, you are working with the way those events were repeated, distorted, ritualized, silenced, or emotionally charged. The material may appear as a story everyone knows but nobody questions. And the task is to listen to how it has shaped perception.
Each time we remember, we reorganize. We select details, connect them, simplify them, protect ourselves from certain parts, exaggerate others, and give the past a form that can be carried in the present.
Frederic Bartlett called this reconstructive memory. For him, memory is shaped by schemas: internal frames that help us organize experience. We remember through what already exists in us — cultural habits, expectations, beliefs, fears, inherited images. This means memory is never only about what happened. It is also about the structure through which we are able to understand what happened.
Collective memory works in a similar way, but at the level of the group. A family, a community, a nation, or a religious group does not remember everything. It reconstructs the past according to what it needs to maintain its identity. Some events become central. Others become secondary. Some are repeated so many times that they become almost sacred. Others disappear, not because they did not matter, but because the group has no place for them.
Maurice Halbwachs gives us an important tool here: memory is always socially framed. Even personal memories are shaped by the groups we belong to. We remember inside language, inside family narratives, inside national histories, inside rituals, inside what has been named and what has remained forbidden.
This means that a memory can belong to us and still not be entirely ours.
Narratives create belonging, but they also create limits. They tell members of the group what can be remembered, how it should be remembered, and what emotional position should accompany it: grief, loyalty, shame, anger, nostalgia, gratitude, silence. Collective memory therefore plays a powerful role in identity formation.
Groups do not only ask, “What happened to us?”
They ask, often unconsciously:
Who are we because of what happened?
This is why collective memory can strengthen solidarity, but it can also feed conflict. When a group becomes attached to one fixed version of the past, memory can harden into mythology. Complexity becomes betrayal. Doubt becomes disloyalty. Other perspectives become threats.
For writing, this is extremely important.
When you write from collective memory, you are working with the way those events were repeated, distorted, ritualized, silenced, or emotionally charged. The material may appear as a story everyone knows but nobody questions. And the task is to listen to how it has shaped perception.
inspirations
Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is not simply an art-historical project, it is more a way of thinking with images.
Between 1924 and 1929, Warburg created a series of large black panels on which he arranged photographs of artworks, maps, diagrams, astrological images, manuscripts, sculptures, advertisements, and cultural fragments. He did not organize them chronologically. He placed them in relation.
Image beside image.
Gesture beside gesture.
A body from antiquity beside a Renaissance painting.
A mythological figure beside a political symbol.
A fold of fabric beside a movement of grief, ecstasy, fear, or violence.
What interested Warburg was not only the image itself, but what survived through it. He called this survival the afterlife of images: the way certain forms, gestures, postures, and emotional intensities return across centuries, even when their original context has disappeared.
For Warburg, collective memory does not move in a straight line. It returns through fragments. Through repetitions. Through visual echoes. Through gestures that migrate from one time to another.
This is where his notion of pathos formula becomes important. A pathos formula is an emotional gesture that carries intensity across time: a raised arm, a twisted body, hair blown by wind, a figure in mourning, a body in ecstasy, a gesture of violence or surrender. These forms survive because they hold something that a culture cannot fully resolve. They are repeated because they still carry charge.
The Mnemosyne Atlas shows that memory is not only stored in stories. It is also stored in images, postures, rituals, bodies, compositions, and visual habits. A culture remembers through the way it represents pain, beauty, heroism, sacrifice, femininity, power, danger, desire.
Warburg teaches us that memory can be composed through montage, through association. For writers, this opens a different way of working with collective memory. Instead of telling a historical story directly, we can build an atlas of traces: inherited images, family gestures, political symbols, religious objects, childhood scenes, public rituals, fragments of language, photographs, myths, slogans, silences.
Warburg also reminds us that collective memory is often unconscious. It does not always speak in clear sentences. Sometimes it appears as a posture, an image, a repetition, a visual obsession. Writing can follow this logic. It can place fragments next to each other and allow meaning to emerge between them. It can create an atlas instead of a story. A constellation instead of a confession. A field of echoes instead of a linear explanation.
Between 1924 and 1929, Warburg created a series of large black panels on which he arranged photographs of artworks, maps, diagrams, astrological images, manuscripts, sculptures, advertisements, and cultural fragments. He did not organize them chronologically. He placed them in relation.
Image beside image.
Gesture beside gesture.
A body from antiquity beside a Renaissance painting.
A mythological figure beside a political symbol.
A fold of fabric beside a movement of grief, ecstasy, fear, or violence.
What interested Warburg was not only the image itself, but what survived through it. He called this survival the afterlife of images: the way certain forms, gestures, postures, and emotional intensities return across centuries, even when their original context has disappeared.
For Warburg, collective memory does not move in a straight line. It returns through fragments. Through repetitions. Through visual echoes. Through gestures that migrate from one time to another.
This is where his notion of pathos formula becomes important. A pathos formula is an emotional gesture that carries intensity across time: a raised arm, a twisted body, hair blown by wind, a figure in mourning, a body in ecstasy, a gesture of violence or surrender. These forms survive because they hold something that a culture cannot fully resolve. They are repeated because they still carry charge.
The Mnemosyne Atlas shows that memory is not only stored in stories. It is also stored in images, postures, rituals, bodies, compositions, and visual habits. A culture remembers through the way it represents pain, beauty, heroism, sacrifice, femininity, power, danger, desire.
Warburg teaches us that memory can be composed through montage, through association. For writers, this opens a different way of working with collective memory. Instead of telling a historical story directly, we can build an atlas of traces: inherited images, family gestures, political symbols, religious objects, childhood scenes, public rituals, fragments of language, photographs, myths, slogans, silences.
Warburg also reminds us that collective memory is often unconscious. It does not always speak in clear sentences. Sometimes it appears as a posture, an image, a repetition, a visual obsession. Writing can follow this logic. It can place fragments next to each other and allow meaning to emerge between them. It can create an atlas instead of a story. A constellation instead of a confession. A field of echoes instead of a linear explanation.
| wittig_guerilleres_english.pdf |
Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères is a book that attacks the structures through which history has been told. Published in 1969, the text creates a collective world of women — the guérillères — who gather, fight, remember, chant, name, mourn, celebrate, and rebuild symbolic space. But Wittig does not write this collective through classical narration. There is no stable protagonist guiding us through events. Instead, the book moves through fragments, lists, songs, rituals, declarations, myths, battles, names, repeated formulas.
The collective appears through accumulation. Wittig breaks the narrative machine itself. Because collective memory is not only about what a group remembers. It is also about the language available to remember with.
If the inherited language has already organized the world through domination, then it is not enough to tell a different story inside the same structure. The structure itself must be disturbed.
In Les Guérillères, memory becomes an act of reconstruction. The women do not return to the past in order to preserve it faithfully. They remake it. They invent genealogies, myths, rituals, and forms of speech that allow another collective body to appear.
This is counter-memory. A memory built against erasure, but also against the forms that produced erasure.
Repetition plays a central role. Names return. Images return. Collective gestures return. The text creates the feeling of a chant, an invocation, a political ritual. Through repetition, memory becomes embodied. It is not only understood intellectually; it enters rhythm, breath, insistence.
Wittig’s use of myth is also crucial. Myth is often used to stabilize power, to make domination appear ancient, natural, unquestionable. But Wittig uses myth differently. She takes the force of myth and turns it against inherited history. She shows that if old myths have shaped collective imagination, new myths must be built to open other possibilities.
For writing, Les Guérillères offers a powerful lesson.
Collective memory does not have to be written as testimony, chronology, or historical explanation.
It can be written as a chorus. As a list. As a ritual. As a broken archive. As a battlefield of language. As a book of names. As a mythology that has not yet existed. Here the question is: what kind of writing could make another memory appear?
The collective appears through accumulation. Wittig breaks the narrative machine itself. Because collective memory is not only about what a group remembers. It is also about the language available to remember with.
If the inherited language has already organized the world through domination, then it is not enough to tell a different story inside the same structure. The structure itself must be disturbed.
In Les Guérillères, memory becomes an act of reconstruction. The women do not return to the past in order to preserve it faithfully. They remake it. They invent genealogies, myths, rituals, and forms of speech that allow another collective body to appear.
This is counter-memory. A memory built against erasure, but also against the forms that produced erasure.
Repetition plays a central role. Names return. Images return. Collective gestures return. The text creates the feeling of a chant, an invocation, a political ritual. Through repetition, memory becomes embodied. It is not only understood intellectually; it enters rhythm, breath, insistence.
Wittig’s use of myth is also crucial. Myth is often used to stabilize power, to make domination appear ancient, natural, unquestionable. But Wittig uses myth differently. She takes the force of myth and turns it against inherited history. She shows that if old myths have shaped collective imagination, new myths must be built to open other possibilities.
For writing, Les Guérillères offers a powerful lesson.
Collective memory does not have to be written as testimony, chronology, or historical explanation.
It can be written as a chorus. As a list. As a ritual. As a broken archive. As a battlefield of language. As a book of names. As a mythology that has not yet existed. Here the question is: what kind of writing could make another memory appear?
creative writing exercises
Choose one element from a collective memory. It can be a memory, a gesture, a phrase, a symbol, a place, a ritual, an object, a silence, or a concept. Choose something that feels inherited, repeated, charged, or older than you.
You will write a text in 7 timed parts.
Keep the same element throughout the whole exercise.
You will write with an alarm. Do not pause between parts. When the alarm rings, move immediately to the next instruction.
Part 1 — 1 minute
Name the element. Do not explain it. Do not contextualize it. Let it appear as a word, a title, a trace, a first mark.
Part 2 — 2 minutes
Describe how this element appears. Stay concrete. Work like Warburg: do not build a story yet. Accumulate. Let description work by a flow of free associations.
Part 3 — 3 minutes
Write what this element does to the body. Do not analyze. Write through body sensation, reaction, rhythm, tension, breath, posture, impulse. Let the body become the place where collective memory is stored.
Part 4 — 4 minutes
Write the element through a collective voice. Move away from the singular “I.” Use we, they, or an unnamed plural voice. Let the element become shared.
Part 5 — 5 minutes
Write what is missing around this element. Do not name the missing thing too directly. Write around it. Let absence structure the text. Work with gaps, interruptions, unfinished sentences, broken lists, withheld names, silences. Ask what was erased, forbidden, forgotten, or made unspeakable.
Part 6 — 6 minutes
Let the element change meaning. Let it stop obeying the story it came from. This is the Wittig moment. Disturb the inherited language. Break the old symbolic order. Let the element refuse its assigned role. Let repetition become revolt. Let the collective voice transform the memory instead of preserving it.
Part 7 — 7 minutes
Transform the element into a new form. Do not explain the transformation. Compose it. Let the text become a new ritual, a new myth, a new chant, a new archive, a new collective body. The element should still be recognizable, but no longer identical to itself. It has passed through repetition, association, body, absence, and revolt. Now let it become something that can be carried differently.
Constraints
You will write a text in 7 timed parts.
Keep the same element throughout the whole exercise.
You will write with an alarm. Do not pause between parts. When the alarm rings, move immediately to the next instruction.
Part 1 — 1 minute
Name the element. Do not explain it. Do not contextualize it. Let it appear as a word, a title, a trace, a first mark.
Part 2 — 2 minutes
Describe how this element appears. Stay concrete. Work like Warburg: do not build a story yet. Accumulate. Let description work by a flow of free associations.
Part 3 — 3 minutes
Write what this element does to the body. Do not analyze. Write through body sensation, reaction, rhythm, tension, breath, posture, impulse. Let the body become the place where collective memory is stored.
Part 4 — 4 minutes
Write the element through a collective voice. Move away from the singular “I.” Use we, they, or an unnamed plural voice. Let the element become shared.
Part 5 — 5 minutes
Write what is missing around this element. Do not name the missing thing too directly. Write around it. Let absence structure the text. Work with gaps, interruptions, unfinished sentences, broken lists, withheld names, silences. Ask what was erased, forbidden, forgotten, or made unspeakable.
Part 6 — 6 minutes
Let the element change meaning. Let it stop obeying the story it came from. This is the Wittig moment. Disturb the inherited language. Break the old symbolic order. Let the element refuse its assigned role. Let repetition become revolt. Let the collective voice transform the memory instead of preserving it.
Part 7 — 7 minutes
Transform the element into a new form. Do not explain the transformation. Compose it. Let the text become a new ritual, a new myth, a new chant, a new archive, a new collective body. The element should still be recognizable, but no longer identical to itself. It has passed through repetition, association, body, absence, and revolt. Now let it become something that can be carried differently.
Constraints
- Do not use a linear narrative.
- Do not explain the historical context directly.
- Do not create one central hero.
- Return to the same element in each part.
- Let the repetitions build the text.
Photo: Fortepan / Horváth Péter & Szent-tamási Mihály