CIS 100 War Stories ** TTh 1-2:15 ** Chambers 235 ** Professor Scott Denham ** ceiling 16
Satisfies core requirements in composition and literature.

In this first-year seminar we will examine representations of war in Western literature and art, with a concentration on narrative texts. The course is built around two central literary works, Homer's Iliad and Christa Wolf's Cassandra. Homer tells the story of the Trojan War by looking at only a few days during the ninth year of this ten-year-long war. Wolf tells the same story from the point of view of Cassandra, whose place as woman and prophetess make her story very different from Homer's. Working within the frame posed by Homer and Wolf, we will look at war stories. Tolstoy's vision of the Napoleonic wars in War and Peace and Stephen Crane's novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, tell us about bourgeois ideas about war and patriotism. We then move to the great rupture in modern warfare and the opening of our violent century by way of World War One and its stories: we'll read Remarque, Jünger, Graves, and several important WWI poems. Alongside these WWI stories and poems we will look at the paintings and drawings of Otto Dix. World War Two and its non-combatant and non-military victims come to us through the bizarre and sorrowful stories of Heller, Vonnegut, and Grass. Vietnam stories make up the last section of the course in which we read Tim O'Brian's combat novel The Things They Carried and Bobbie Ann Mason's tale of the homefront and aftermath, In Country. In the Vietnam section of the course we will also view three Vietnam War films: Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, and Oliver Stone's Platoon.

Our topics will include myth and mythologization, experience and fictionalization, trauma and storytelling, narrative structures and narrative theory, lyric forms and genres, gendered perspectives, male and female visions.

Weekly essays (1-4 pages) and one longer research paper (15-20 pages). Written work includes regular revisions, peer review, some in-class writing exercises, and a formal presentation and defense of the longer paper for the class.

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