82-129: World Wars & World Peace in Literature & the Visual Arts
This course attempts to uncover the cross-current of voices (descriptive, predictive and persuasive) that have accompanied the vicissitudes of war and peace in this century. Students will learn to "read" cultural artifacts (such as literature, painting and film) as instruments that both reflect and shape their times. By comparing cultural artifacts from several different countries (primarily Russia, Germany, France and England), we also hope to uncover some interesting cross-cultural parallels and contrasts.

The heart of the course's methodology will be comparative analysis. Students will be encouraged to look for similarities and differences in the messages conveyed by artists and writers before and after the two major wars of this century (i.e., examining change or continuity over time) and to ascertain how various nations have described, evaluated and forecast these events (i.e., examining change or continuity across cultures).

Readings will include works such as the war poems of Wilfred Owen, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, excerpts from Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Einstein's writings on peace. We will devote a special chapter to women writers in the period of World War I. Also: Jean Jaurès and the socialist peace movement in France, the history of the League of Nations, the Esperanto movement, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the democratic revolutions in Germany and Austria and the subsequent rise of Nazism will also be considered.

Painting: the Expressionists, Picasso, Matisse, Käthe Kollwitz, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, among others.
Film: Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Derek Jarman's War Requiem; Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies, and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, among others.