English 294 - Writing War
WRITING WAR
Spring
2021
01
4.00
Cornelia Pearsall
MW 10:55-12:10
Smith College
30689-S21
REMOTE
cpearsal@smith.edu
How is literature created out of loss, beauty out of brutality? Drawing from poetry, novels, and memoirs,
this class studies literary representations of war, attending to issues of race, nationality, class, gender and sexuality, experience and memory, trauma and healing, peace. We’ll focus in particular on the extraordinary range of writings spawned from the horrors of the First World War (including works of Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, and Vera Brittain), while also looking to canonical writers (including Homer, Alfred Tennyson, W. H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sylvia Plath), and contemporary poets, such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Solmaz Sharif, and Ocean Vuong.
this class studies literary representations of war, attending to issues of race, nationality, class, gender and sexuality, experience and memory, trauma and healing, peace. We’ll focus in particular on the extraordinary range of writings spawned from the horrors of the First World War (including works of Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, and Vera Brittain), while also looking to canonical writers (including Homer, Alfred Tennyson, W. H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sylvia Plath), and contemporary poets, such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Solmaz Sharif, and Ocean Vuong.