Department of English

War and Representation is a seminar dedicated to the study of war across literature and other media from the 19th to 21st century, with a particular emphasis on Russophone contexts. We will investigate questions of genre and writing practices, authorship and readership, and historical and social interventions through literature and other media by examining canonical and non-canonical works from a range of artistic traditions. Reading books, watching films, and playing the occasional game, we pose several questions: how has art represented and justified war? How has it resisted and critiqued it? How are concepts of nation and ideology understood through war texts? In what ways do contemporaneous and retrospective depictions of war differ from one another? How does form (books, films, games) affect how war narratives are conveyed? While the course’s main emphasis is on Russophone art, the course’s materials originate from myriad cultures and artistic traditions, including Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Belarusian, American, German, and Italian. The course’s texts will span a variety of mediums, and include novels, short stories, film, poetry, oral testimony, video games, and photography. Through the close reading of a variety of texts, we will explore the ways in which war is not only represented in literature and other media, but how it is repackaged as art fit for popular consumption. We will seek to understand the place of war in arts and cultures, and its role in (re)producing both histories and mythologies. All readings and discussions will be conducted in English.