Today Americans fear mysterious terrorists, while also debating whether fighting them requires torture and limits on civil liberties. So, this seems a good time to see what literature suggests about how people represent and confront their "enemies." This course will focus on novels and true-life visual accounts (so-called "graphic novels"); we will also analyze two films. The course will be divided into three units. In the first, we will read books with characters who feel anger toward people they identify as personal enemies: David Maine's Fallen (a novel about Cain and Abel), Valerie Martin's Property, and Nella Larsen's Passing. The second unit will deal with Americans' perceptions of internal and external enemies during the 1940's and 1950s. We will read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (an imagined alternative history of the World War Two era) and Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate; we will also watch the 1962 film version of Condon's book and another movie, On the Waterfront. The final unit will consider a lot America's current "war on terrorism," by examining three works: Marjane Satrapi's pictorial memoir Persepolis; a "graphic novel" version of the 9/11 Commission Report; and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, an allegorical novel about torture.

Since this is a composition course, the lectures and the class discussions will spend much time considering how to write about the material we analyze. Writing assignments will include short exploratory "micro-themes" (2 pages each), a medium-length paper (3 pages), and two longer papers (4-5 pages each). There will also be a final exam and possibly a midterm.