Module Overview

• Become acqainted with a wide range of texts
• Acquire a more detailed knowledge of Vietnam war representation
• Learn a method of reading war representations
• Develop preliminary conclusions about the nature of war representation

• My knowledge is strongest in eighteenth-century literature and culture. I've also read a lot of war writing and quite a lot about it. I am not an expert on the Vietnam War. We will have to investigate this together.
• Roughly half the texts on the Vietnam War section are from Vietnam. The texts in the first section about a method are from Europe and the US. The method is developed from those. We will have to hope it works for Vietnamese texts.
• There was a big shift in the representational understanding of war in Europe in the eighteenth century. War became regarded as a man-made event, rather than a natural or divine one. There was also a new focus on ordinary soldiers and on victims, both civilian and military. Whether and when there were similar shifts in different parts of East Asia I don't know.

PART ONE. Week One: Introduction & Approach

Questions: Why are war representations important? What can they tell us about attitudes to war and to a particular war? How do we read them?

PART TWO. Week Two: Perspectives

Questions: What are the positions of speaker/viewer and of reader/audience? What difference does the perspective make?

Week Three: People

Questions: What "types" do we find in war representations? How do versions of types differ? What impact does the nature of types have on the representation?
 

Week Four: Plots

Questions: Characters in representations are generaly placed in relation to one another. Relations tend to imply causes and effects. Ultimate consequences tend to imply meaning. What are these relations and how do they develop? What do they suggest about causes and meaning?
 

Week Five: Politics

Questions: What is a text saying about the war at hand. What is it saying about war in general?

PART THREE. Case Study: The Vietnam War

The second half of the semester focuses on the Vietnam War as a case study. We will focus more closely on particular representations than in the first half, asking of them the same questions but with more concentration.

Week Six: Introductory

Week Seven: Full Metal Jacket
 

Week Eight: The Sorrow of War

Week Nine: Exhibition 

 
Week Ten: The Things They Carried
 

Week Eleven: Review
 

PART FOUR. Week Twelve: Consultations

Week Thirteen: Stepping Back

 

• 8-10 minutes. 10 is an absolute maximum
• based on one striking small example
• raises questions, provokes discussion 

• Choose EITHER a work from Weeks 1-5, OR a work of you own choice (after consultation with me)
• Write a short (800-1000 word) essay showing what vision of war that text projects, and how that vision is achieved
• You should pay attention to the four aspects we have discussed in Weeks 2-5, but the importance of each will vary according to the text
• You should try to move beyond the obvious. To argue "Work X suggests that war is hell" doesn't get us very far. You need to think about what kind of hell, of whose making, inhabited by what kind of people, and even how different from / similar to other hells. 

• This should be between 2000 and 2200 words long
• You can choose any topic concerning the representation of war, after consultation with me.