General
War and Rumors of War
Fall 2008
John Sheehy
The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in history: for the first time technology made it possible for armed forces to engage in routine attacks on civilian populations, to kill indiscriminately and from a distance, to destroy entire cities from the air, to threaten the annihilation of humanity itself. Our experiences with war in the last century have set the stage for the wars we fight today; more than that, our responses to today's conflicts are predicated on ways of thinking about war, and about human conflict generally, that developed in the preceding century. In this course we will attempt to understand the wars of the last century, and the ways of thinking they have engendered, by looking at various cultural reactions to them: these will include books like Heller's Catch-22 , Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name, and films (as we have time) like "The Best Days of Our Lives," "Full Metal Jacket," "Breaker Morant" and more.
Fall 2008
John Sheehy
The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in history: for the first time technology made it possible for armed forces to engage in routine attacks on civilian populations, to kill indiscriminately and from a distance, to destroy entire cities from the air, to threaten the annihilation of humanity itself. Our experiences with war in the last century have set the stage for the wars we fight today; more than that, our responses to today's conflicts are predicated on ways of thinking about war, and about human conflict generally, that developed in the preceding century. In this course we will attempt to understand the wars of the last century, and the ways of thinking they have engendered, by looking at various cultural reactions to them: these will include books like Heller's Catch-22 , Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name, and films (as we have time) like "The Best Days of Our Lives," "Full Metal Jacket," "Breaker Morant" and more.[$582,646,241,555 Iraq War Cost
]
- Course Information
- Assignments
- Course Resources