AU kursuskatalog arkiv

ENG: Valgfag: Literature and War (ba) ( efterår 2007 - 5 ECTS )

Rammer for udbud

• Uddannelsessprog: (se under Undervisnings- og arbejdsform)
• Niveau: Bachelor
• Semester/kvarter: 3. semester
• Timer per uge: 2
• Deltagerbegrænsning: 20
• Undervisningssted: Århus
• Hovedområde: Det Humanistiske Fakultet
• Udbud ID: 9530

Formål

Ved bedømmelsen af prøvepræstationen vil der blive lagt vægt på, i hvor høj grad den studerende

-    demonstrerer kendskab til emnet og de relevante tekster, teorier og problemstillinger.

-    demonstrerer færdighed i emnerelateret litteratursøgning, selektion og disponering af et givet stofområde.

-    bruger relevante fagbegreber, -teorier og -terminologier.

-    anvender relevante analytiske færdigheder opnået gennem det første års kurser (f.eks. at kunne forklare, fortolke, vurdere, sammenligne og skelne) på et afgrænset, mere detaljeret emneområde inden for engelskstudiet.

Indhold

War is sometimes said to be too massive and appalling for fiction to deal with. In fact, there are only two really well known novels about war in English (and they are both on this course). On the other hand, there's a lot of very good war poetry, and it is possible that most of us owe our sense of what at least the 'Great' War of 1914-18 was like, more to the poets who fought (and in many cases died) in it than to anyone else. And then, the more one looks around, the more it becomes apparent that a great deal of literature is marked, in one way or another, by being written in a time of war (like now), even if the authors in question never fired a shot. In this course, we will try to discover how important war is, as a general presence in literature in English. We will also try to find out whether literature can help us to understand war, and whether it could even, in theory, help us to avoid war (supposing that that's what we want). Or perhaps, on the other hand, literature is usually complicit in war? Perhaps literature can even be a kind of war?

The course will be roughly divided into four parts. In Part One we will look at the roots of English-language writing about war, going all the way back to the Bible and Homer's Iliad ; we will then see Early Modern writing about war at its best in two very different plays by Shakespeare. In Part Two we will trace the development of a modern understanding of war through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paying attention both to theoretical accounts in the tradition of Clausewitz and to popular, sentimental reactions such as Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade'; this part will culminate in a reading of Stephen Crane's classic novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage . Part Three will concern the literature of the First and Second World Wars, ranging from poets who fought in the trenches, through memoirs by nurses and other non-combatants, to the best-known war novel of the second half of the twentieth century, Joseph Heller's serio-comic Catch-22 . In Part Four, we will come close to our own war-ridden time, and will ask whether literature has anything to offer when we try to make sense of what is going on now in Iraq , and in so many other places. What has literature to say in the era of the TV war, and of the unending War upon Terror?

Faglige forudsætninger

Underviser

Dominic Rainsford

Undervisnings- og arbejdsform

Undervisningen i disciplinen foregår på hold, og der lægges vægt på arbejdsformer, der kan omfatte læsning af primær- og sekundærtekster, skriftlige opgaver og/eller mundtlige bidrag fra de studerende, holddiskussioner samt gruppearbejde. Forudsætningen for, at undervisningen forløber til­freds­stillende, er de studerendes regelmæssige tilstedeværelse samt aktive deltagelse i de faglige diskus­sioner.

Litteratur

Bedømmelse