War in Experience and Expression: Origins of Modern War-Writing, 1500-1900

Catalog description

This seminar treats the tension between the compelling moral, historical and psychological imperatives to represent armed conflict and the rhetorical difficulties attendant on doing so. Through critical and contextual analysis of texts situated within the modern European tradition of war-writing, students will examine the motives which make the accurate rendering of war both necessary and impossible: to impose order and meaning on the chaos of violence, to commemorate the victims without inducing guilt in the survivors, to celebrate individual acts of heroism while promoting collective peace, but above all to bring to bear the resources of linguistic expression on an experience of extremity which ultimately resists discursive mediation and, despite its ubiquity in human history, subverts our conception of the ordinary and challenges established analytic taxonomies. (HIST-HEU)