Comparative Literature 350: Narratives of War
Monday and Wednesday 2:00 – 3:15 p.m.
Curtin Hall 321
Dan Haumschild, Ph.D.
Description:
Modern societies are continuously preparing for, engaged in, or recovering from warfare. War
influences the policies that control our daily life, it defines our identities, and its annihilating
force captures our imagination. In ‘Narratives of War’ we will read stories of death, destruction,
suffering, pain, and horror. We will examine accounts of rape, we will consider pictorial
representations of mutilation, and we will hear from those who have witnessed genocide. In
short, we will be learning about events so horrible that they defy representation; yet we will
spend an entire semester studying these very representations. This course will offer a great
number of lessons about war through the narratives that we read, but it will also challenge the
very notion of bearing witness to an atrocity. In this class, we will read stories about the Spanish
Civil War, child soldiers in West Africa, and the Rwandan genocide. We will look at sketches of
mass atrocities and films about firebombing. Finally, we will examine how war itself can be used
as a form of narration and how trauma continues to alter the way that we understand disasters of
this magnitude. Throughout ‘Narratives of War’, we will play with the tension that exists
between unspeakable acts of violence and the human desire to tell one’s story.
The following is a list of possible sources that will be selected for class and is subject to change.
Theory:
Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others
Cathy Caruth – selections from Unclaimed Experience
Roberto Esposito – selections from Bíos
Jacques Derrida – selections from Politics of Friendship
Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida – Demeure, The Instant of My Death
Achille Mbembe – Necropolitics
Literature:
Uzodinma Iweala – Beasts of No Nation
Marie Umutesi – Surviving the Slaughter
George Orwell – Homage to Catalonia
Pat Barker – Regeneration
Other:
Francisco Goya – Disasters of War prints
Simon Schama – Power of Art, Picasso
Fog of War