Literature and War in the 20th and 21st Centuries

This course will explore contemporary literature that responds to and depicts war and violence including the World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian/ Israeli crisis, and the Iraq War among others. The objective of this course is to explore the modalities of war and violence in a range of forms and contexts and the role they play in the construction/ reconstruction of subjectivities and narratives. Writers will include Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, Tim O’Brien, Ghada Al-Samman, Nuha Al-Radi, René Girard, Elaine Scarry, and others. in the United States of America. Yet, at the beginning of the third millennium, voices have been raised against what is perceived as the hegemony of theory, and attempts are being made, on the one hand, to break the dictatorship of postmodernist thought and, on the other hand, to delineate the features of the new age. Theorists include J. Hillis Miller, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Umberto Eco, and others.