Conflict and Culture

The age-old relationship between literature and war is fundamentally a problem of ethics. This course is centrally concerned with ethics and aesthetics: the ethics of war, the aesthetics of war literature and film, and the ethics of making art about war. It explores the triangulation of warfare, literature, and ethics in the 20th-21st centuries, approaching this relationship through multiple thematic frames and genres (poetry, fiction, film, photography, and critical essays), with texts drawn from a diverse array of world cultures. Topics include total war, memory and trauma, translation, partition, war and comics, and virtual warfare.