SEMINAR PROFILE

H18 -
Words of War: Understanding Honor and Horror

Perhaps because the human impulse to wage war is as strong as the human impulse to create, war has been a subject of literature since human beings first began to tell stories. We will examine how literature depicts war and what literary visions of war can tell us that history, anthropology and political science cannot. We will focus on texts from three wars: the Trojan war as revealed in selections of The Iliad; the First World War as depicted by Pat Barker, Ernest Hemingway, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; and Vietnam a expressed by Tim O'Brien, Michael Herr, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Scholar:

Ann Murphy

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

11/21/2008, 12/5/2008

H18 -	Words of War: Understanding Honor and Horror

	Perhaps because the human impulse to wage war is as strong as the human impulse to create, war has been a subject of literature since human beings first began to tell stories. We will examine how literature depicts war and what literary visions of war can tell us that history, anthropology and political science cannot. We will focus on texts from three wars: the Trojan war as revealed in selections of The Iliad; the First World War as depicted by Pat Barker, Ernest Hemingway, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; and Vietnam a expressed by Tim O'Brien, Michael Herr, and Francis Ford Coppola.

		Scholar:	Ann Murphy
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	11/21/2008, 12/5/2008