Instructor: Carton, E Areas: VI / I
Unique #: 36025 Flags: Independent Inquiry; Writing
Semester: Fall 2013 Restrictions: English Honors, Plan I Honors
Cross-lists: LAH 350 Computer Instruction: No
Topic previously offered as E 379S (embedded topic: Literature of American Warfare).
Prerequisites: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.
Description: This class will explore the circumstances, practices, collective beliefs and personal experiences of American wars and warfare as represented in fictional and nonfictional accounts, in prose and poetry, and in battlefield and home front representations. Though the course will not be organized chronologically, it will include accounts of and responses to a broad historical array of conflicts from the 17th century wars between the earliest English settlers and the Native American tribes of New England through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the young current century. These conflicts will be examined in light of America's changing self-images and position in the world, in light of the U. S.'s westward (and eastward) territorial and imperial expansions, and in light of the powerful and abiding American ideology of perpetual innocence, righteousness, chosenness, and manifest destiny among the nations and of that ideology's equally abiding critique. Contestation over questions of masculinity and femininity, patriotism and treason, and racial identity and otherness will also, inescapably, be matters of concern, as will be questions of the politics and poetics of different media, forms, and genres of war's representation.
Texts: Course readings will likely include short and occasionally longer works by some of the following writers: William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Dalton Trumbo, Joseph Heller, Adrienne Rich, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Herr, Myra McPherson, Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Helena Maria Viramontes, Philip Gourevitch, Helen Benedict, and Kevin Powers.
Requirements & Grading: Students will be evaluated on the basis of class attendance and participation, Blackboard discussion posts, two analytical essays, and a final research paper.
Blackboard discussion posts, 25%; Analytical essays, 30%; Attendance and participation, 20%; Final Research Paper, 25%.