[Forside] [Hovedområder] [Perioder] [Udannelser] [Alle kurser på en side]
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.
War is sometimes said to be too massive and terrible for fiction to deal with. In fact, there are only a few well known novels about war in English. On the other hand, there is 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 obvious it becomes 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 (if that is what we want). But 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 three 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 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will read Stephen Crane's novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage (still sometimes described as the best war novel in English), and a wide selection of First World War poetry. Part Three will concern the war literature of the recent past and almost-present, from Vietnam to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. What can literature contribute in the era of the TV war, and of the unending War upon Terror?
Our definition of ‘literature' throughout the course will be quite broad, and we will also see several films.
Ingen.
Dominic Rainsford
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.
Engelsk
The following books should be bought (in the editions specified):
William Shakespeare, Henry V , ed. T. W. Craik (Arden Shakespeare, 1995). ISBN 978-1904271086.
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida , ed. David Bevington (Arden Shakespeare, 1998). ISBN 978-1903436691.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage , ed. Donald Pizer and Eric Carl Link, 4th edn (Norton Critical Edition, 2008). ISBN 978-0393930757.
George Walter, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (Penguin, 2006). ISBN 978-0141181905.
You will also be required to print your own copies of various shorter texts which will be uploaded to the course conference in FirstClass.
The following books are particularly recommended as supplementary reading, and will be among those available on the semester shelf for this course in Biblioteket for Sprog, Litteratur og Kultur :
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (Penguin, 2007).
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Harper Perennial, 2006).
Lawrence Freedman, ed., War (Oxford UP, 1994).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory , new edn (Oxford UP, 2000).
Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq (Polity, 2005).
Aktiv, tilfredsstillende deltagelse i undervisningen eller bunden skriftlig prøve eller mundtlig eksamen.
