ENGL 705: Seminar in American Literature: War, Gender, and Domesticity in American Fiction
Professor: Dr. Susan Farrell
Location: College of Charleston
Time: Tuesday 6:00 – 8:45
War has often been seen as the domain of men and thus irrelevant to gender analysis, and American writers have frequently examined war according to traditional gender expectations: that boys become men by going to war and girls become women by building a home. This course offers an in-depth look at selected American war fiction from the previous 100 years that complicates such expectations. We’ll focus specifically on four main areas: Ernest Hemingway and World War I, Kurt Vonnegut and World War II, Tim O’Brien and the Vietnam War, and finally, select contemporary writers on 9/11 and the War on Terror. We’ll examine these writers in their historical and cultural contexts as we explore their depictions of gender relations, imagined domestic spaces in wartime, and the representability of trauma. In other words, we’ll look at how they mingle the front lines with the home front, the traditionally masculine with the traditionally feminine. We’ll focus as well on debates about the limits of language; definitions of courage and cowardice; PTSD and the lingering effects of war trauma; and how best to memorialize war.
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