The Literature of War and Peace

Catalog description

"On these battlefields," F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "my lovely, safe world blew itself up." In this course we will explore works of literature and film about World War I (1914-1918), known at the time as "The Great War," as well as works that portray the return to peace and the turn to materialism in the 1920s. Among the works we will study are The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; poetry by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Own; the play Journey's end by R.C. Sheriff; and the films Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick and Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.