Title: TOPICS IN LITERATURE

PRQ:

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the United States has been a key participant–and especially recently, the leading force–in the most destructive and wide-ranging military conflicts in human history.  American poets, novelists, memoirists, oral historians, and filmmakers have been witnesses of and sometimes protestors against the carnage.  Modern War in American Literature and Film begins with World War I, during which U.S. citizens long debated whether and how to get involved, and then–in a characteristic gesture–committed themselves to the “War to End All Wars” with fiercely jingoist fervor.  It continues with literature responding to World War II, which includes propagandistic wartime films such as the jolly Mrs. Minniver and more subtle Lifeboat, the clinical detail of wartime poetry by Randall Jarrell and James Dickie, and the grim treatment of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which in many ways anticipate the darker mood of responses to Vietnam.  Vietnam war literature and film will be the fulcrum of the course, as we consider memoirs including Michael Herr’s Dispatches, classic films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon, poetry by Yusef Komunyakaa, W. D. Ehrhardt, and Denise Levertov, and fiction by Tim O’Brien and Larry Heinemann.  Finally, the American-led “War on Terror” precipitated by the events of 9/11/01 has produced a new round of war literature and film, including homefront fiction like Don DeLillo’s  Falling Man, battlefront poetry such as Michael Turner’s Here, Bullet, and films including The Hurt Locker.  Modern American War Literature and Film will conclude with an investigation of this work.

Class attendance and active participation in discussion; one class presentation; a research prospectus and research paper; final exam.

Possible Primary Texts Include:

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

Mark Van Wienen, ed., Rendezvous with Death

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato

Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story

Michael Herr, Dispatches

Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country

Don DeLillo, Falling Man

Mrs. Minniver (dir. William Wyler)

Lifeboat (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Platoon (dir. Oliver Stone)

The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

Selected Poetry by James Dickie, Randall Jarrell, Yusef Komunyakaa, W.D.Ehrhardt, Denise Levertov, Michael Turner, and others