REQUIRED
READINGS / ASSIGNMENTS
AND EXAMINATIONS /
SCHEDULE
OF READINGS
WRITING
AND RESEARCH / RELATED
LINKS / WEEKLY
RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Much of what we think we know about the experience of war in the last century comes to us from mainstream film; and accuracy and "telling it like it happened" are often sacrificed for the sake of a good story. War veterans, however, must struggle to construct a narrative that not only is faithful to their experience and that of their fellow participants, but also makes sense of that experience for themselves and their readers. This course examines how war stories are told through literature and film in the 20th century. Our subject matter comes from a variety of genres-poetry, fiction, memoir, epic, oral history, documentary journalism, literary criticism, and film-from the Great War, the Second World War, the war in Vietnam, and other modern conflicts. Among the readings are works by the Great War poets, novelists James Jones, Joseph Heller, and Tim O'Brien, and literary critic Paul Fussell. Excerpts from a number of war films--from *All Quiet on the Western Front* (1929) to *The Thin Red Line* (1999) will also be shown and discussed in class in the context of the readings. Assignments will include informal written responses to the readings, an in-class presentation on one of the assigned book-length works or a group of shorter works, a 5-7 page research paper on an independent topic, and a final exam.
Some of the questions we'll be exploring include:
What goes into a war story, and why does a given writer choose to tell it in the way he/she does? Who is qualified to write about the experience of war?
Does the writer's close involvement with war change whether we consider his/her work as art?
What literary traditions do war writers draw on, and how do they transform them?
What gender-, class-, and race-related tensions come to the surface in war writing?