ENG 414 - Senior Seminar: Words of War: Understanding Honor And Horror

Institution:

Assumption University

Subject:

Description:

Perhaps because the human impulse to wage war is as strong as the human impulse to create, war has been a subject of literature since human beings first began to tell stories. In this seminar we will examine how literature depicts war and what it can tell us that history, anthropology and political science cannot. How does our need to make meaning through language illuminate our apparently equally compelling need to make war? We will focus on texts from three wars: the Trojan war in The Iliad, that central text of western civilization and one of the earliest efforts to understand the causes and effects of war; the First World War in novels and plays such as Hemingway’s In Our Time and A Farewell to Arms and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and in poetry by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; and our own wars in Iraq and on terror in contemporary poetry, in fiction and drama such as Baker’s Double Vision and Reich’s Daniel Variations, as well as in dramatic and documentary films. (Spring) Murphy/ Three credits

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.assumption.edu

Phone Number:

(508) 767-7000

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Semester

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