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It’s already February, but it’s not too late to start making good on one of my intentions for the new year: to make a record of the course I’m teaching this semester. I have my students write regular discussion starters and reflections about what we are reading and learning, and they really value the experience. By writing down their thoughts, they engage with the material more deeply. I realized, though, that I wasn’t doing the same. So many great experiences I’ve had in the classroom have evaporated as soon as the semester ended. I don’t want to let that happen again, especially with the course I’m teaching now, which I designed to help me think through the difficult moment we are living in now. 

I’ve taught a number of graduate seminars in recent years that have been transformative experiences, each one more exciting than the last. I like to develop new courses that relate to my current research interests or something I would like to explore. This semester, I wanted to explore how writers engage with war or are transformed by it–not just the battles themselves, but the social upheavals that they create and that we continue to wrestle with. It’s an American literature course, focusing on the Civil War, WWI, and WWII. That’s a lot to take on, and I was cursing myself while I prepared for the class over the winter break. But I wanted to look at the big picture, to see overarching themes.

Here is the description that I gave to the students:

This is not a course about how the major writers you already know were affected by war or wrote about war. Instead, this is a course about how Americans wrestled with war and its attendant social upheavals through literature. This course cannot begin to do justice to every phase of the three major wars the U.S. has experienced and the writings they have produced. The aim of this course is rather to consider the ways that the Civil War, WWI, and WWII have generated significant bodies of literature, which ask us to consider the nation’s identity, the role literature has played in framing and interpreting these wars, and, ultimately, how American literature has been forever changed by the experiences of these wars, at home and abroad.

The major themes of the course will be memory, trauma, dislocation, and social upheaval. Wars are significant not only for the violence they unleash but also for the ways they disrupt everyday life and seemingly stable social arrangements. They make the formerly unthinkable (such as the end of slavery or women working beyond the home) possible or even necessary. After wars are over, returning to a sense of normalcy or traditional hierarchies can be nearly impossible. In times of severe crisis societies undo themselves and are remade, thus these wars have given the nation and its inhabitants opportunities to reexamine and rethink what it means to be American, who gets to call themselves a citizen, what the “United States” stands for, and what role the U.S. has to play in the world of the future. These questions will always be in the back of our minds as we engage with literature that may have other, more overt, aims, such as promoting a war, defining the purpose of a war, questioning war itself, trying to comprehend the horror a war has unleashed, or simply documenting the extraordinary events that occurred during wartime.

Instead of ordering a long list of books for the course, I have collected many shorter pieces, to help recreate the conversations that were taking place between a wide variety of authors. Here is a sampling (although not nearly all) of what we are reading this semester:

Civil War:

• Abraham Lincoln, First and Second Inaugural Addresses
• Jefferson Davis, Farewell Speech to Congress
• Frederick Douglass, “The Mission of the War”
• Henry James, “A Most Extraordinary Case”
• Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches
• Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp
• Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Rodman the Keeper” and “Old Gardiston”
• Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh”

WWI:

• Charlie Chaplin, Shoulder Arms (film)
• Richard Harding Davis, “The Man Who Had Everything”
• William March, “Fifteen from Company K”
• Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”
• Claude McKay, “The Soldier’s Return”
• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

WWII:

• Frank Capra, “Why We Fight,” parts one and seven (film)
• Ralph Ellison, “Flying Home”
• Gwendolyn Brooks, “Gay Chaps at the Bar”
• Ann Petry, “In Darkness and Confusion”
• Toshio Mori, “Tomorrow is Coming, Children,” “Slant-Eyed Americans” and “The Brothers Murata”
• Kay Boyle, “This They Took with Them,” “Men,” “Defeat”
• Martha Gelhorn, “The Bomber Boys,” “The First Hospital Ship,” “Das Deutsche Folk,” “Dachau”
• Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”
• Kay Boyle, “Winter Night,” “The Lost,” and “Frankfurt In Our Blood”
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
• Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus

So far, we’ve read through Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, focusing quite a bit on the intricate relationship between war and literature/language/rhetoric, as well as how gendered the Civil War was. Alcott wrote about her adventures going to war as a nurse and breaking many taboos for women along the way, while James wrote about a soldier who has been so shattered by his service that he can only think of himself as “half a man.” As we learned from our secondary readings, the Civil War fundamentally challenged then-current ideas of white manhood and womanhood. Men found it more difficult to define themselves as “free men” or “self-made men” against their dependents (slaves and/or women), while many women either chose or were forced to live more independent lives.