| Kommentar |
As a topic and a motif, war has figured prominently in American literature since its inception. This is hardly a surprise, given the fact that America as a nation state emerged as a consequence of extended warfare. Armed conflicts with Indigenous nations and between colonial powers during the colonial period, the Revolutionary War, the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, the Civil War, the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, the twenty first-century wars in the Middle East – all these and more have stirred American literary imagination. While dealing with their contemporary military conflicts, the writers often look to the past, for contexts and connections, and perhaps perspective and understanding. The storied deep past of classical antiquity, with its myth-encircled clashes of powers at Troy, Thermopylae, in Persia and beyond, has provided one of the vehicles for American writers through which to explore the meaning and experience of war. In this class, we will acquaint ourselves with some examples of American literature that do just that, works such as Laura Riding’s A Trojan Ending (1937), Steven Pressfield’s Alexander: The Virtues of War (2004), and Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians (2004). In our engagement with these creative works we will look to their poetics as well as their politics and consider the ways in which they intersect, negotiating an aesthetic suitable for addressing their respective concerns and conflicts while thinking through and with old stories. To inform our inquiry, we will turn to theories of classical reception as a helpful theoretical framework for these investigations.
Students will be expected to have read the respective texts in advance of the class and to come prepared to discuss their own ideas in relation to them.
You will need to purchase the following book for this class:
Pressfield, Steven. Alexander: The Virtues of War. Bantam Books, 2005. ISBN 978-0-553-81435-4 |
