• Home
  • About
  • Mobile
  • Open Content
  • Search

Module Overview


  • Description
  • Facilitators
  • Weblinks
  • Timetable
ULT2298D 

IMAGINING WAR
   2017/2018, Semester 1
   University Scholars Programme (University Scholars Programme)
Modular Credits: 4
  Tags: --

General

Top 
             ...let first with penne declare
What thing warre is, and wherof it proceeds
             
(George Gascoigne, "The fruites of Warre" [1575]).
 
This is a module that asks questions. You will encounter new texts, and know something at the end of it that you did not know at the beginning. However, the key motivation is to enquire into what conceptions of particular wars and war in general are embodied in representational texts. Behind this is the larger question - which we cannot answer - of the ways in which war representation might influence whether and how war is fought.
 

Learning Outcomes

TopYou will:
  • 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

Caveats

Top
  • 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.

Learning Modes

TopLearning will be by reading, watching, looking and discussing. I hope everyone will be actively engaged in the class and will bring their own interests, knoweldge and ideas to it.

The topic benefits a lot from a multi-disciplinary approach. Engineers, historians, scientists and social scientists have as much to contribute to the module as literature students.

Texts

TopYou are expected to read or watch in advance of the class. You should also go beyond the texts listed here. I hope you will post interesting texts you find on IVLE and bring them to class.
 
Many of the texts are short or will be approached as excerpts. They are available online, and listed in the schedule. There are four full and longer texts:
 
Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War (1990)
Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket (1987)
NUS Museum, Vietnam 1954 – 1975: War Drawings and Posters from the Ambassador Dato’ N Parameswaran Collection
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)
 

Syllabus

Top

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

 

Assessed Tasks

TopASSESSMENT
 
Class participation (10%)
Presentation (20%)
Short paper (20%) 
Term paper (50%) 

Presentation
  • 8-10 minutes. 10 is an absolute maximum
  • based on one striking small example
  • raises questions, provokes discussion 
Short Paper
  • 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. 
Term Paper
  • This should be between 2000 and 2200 words long
  • You can choose any topic concerning the representation of war, after consultation with me.

Workload

Top0-0-4-0-0-6

Workload Components : A-B-C-D-E
A: no. of lecture hours per week
B: no. of tutorial hours per week
C: no. of lab hours per week
D: no. of hours for projects, assignments, fieldwork etc per week
E: no. of hours for preparatory work by a student per week

Contact

  • IVLE Webmaster

Social Media

Latest Alerts

  • IVLE scheduled maintenance every Tuesday 0300 hrs - 0700 hrs

Centre for Instructional Technology

Legal  |  Acceptable Use Policy

Copyright © 2015, National University of Singapore. All rights reserved.