This is a special course, linked to the teaching of L141 in the Fall of 2001. Participants in this course will work together to design the fall course and will serve as AIs, responsible for a discussion section of the freshman course and for occasional lectures or class presentations to the entire group of 144 students. The purpose of this course is to train graduate students in the planning and execution of a large undergraduate course on reading and writing about literature. To that end we will read theoretical as well as literary and cultural texts and work together to find ways to convey this material effectively to undergraduates.

The L141 course we will team-teach is tentatively titled “Representing War.” It aims to offer a range of representations from a variety of historical periods and cultural contexts, if only to trouble our own 21st century American assumptions on the subject. What counts as war? where does it begin and end? What does it mean or when does it find meaning? In part the course will be an introduction to the difficulty of representation itself, as well as to the impulse (or imperative) culture has to find meaning - even in something as destructive as warfare. Thus, along side the obvious political implications of this issue, we will consider its aesthetic and ethical dimensions.

Much of our time will be spent reading novels, poems, short fiction and essays (and viewing films) which offer powerful or curious representations of war. I imagine beginning with the Iliad, but I encourage all class members to contact me with suggestions for our reading. Our attention will focus on selecting which works to teach to the freshman, in what order and to what purpose: what will the students do with this material?. To better frame our own questions and undergird our analysis of texts, we will also read a number of critical, theoretical and philosophical works that address the main issues of the course: works by Elaine Scarry, Michael Walzer, Annette Baier, Michael Rogin, Paul Fussell. Catherine McKinnon, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and others. But even as we tread this intellectual ground, we cannot separate that work from questions about how we lecture, what assignments we give, how we grade, how we lead discussion, etc. Whether the topic itself demands a special response to these questions will be at the heart of our efforts.

This is very much a hands-on course, aimed at a very practical, pedagogical end - the design of an interesting, intellectually challenging and workable course. A crucial part of that design will be the effective integration of student writing with interpretation in all aspects of the course. So even as we think about how war has been represented, we need to ask ourselves how we and our students will represent it.

The final project for the course will be a collective syllabus (perhaps with individual modifications) for the up-coming L141. But participants will also be asked to write two short essays in response to class reading and our pedagogical discussions.