Students are expected to maintain brief journal entries on their readings. Two in-class midterm examinations. Class attendance is mandatory. Yet, no real war was ever fought without imagined warfare. While the real and the imagined battlefields have to be distinguished, their relationship needs careful examination.
Wars have beginnings and ends, imagined wars are timeless.
They have been part of the history of literature, philosophy and the arts from early on. Little is known about primitive wars and what we know is based upon very few images and oral reports. There is, however, a long tradition of representations and visions of war in Europe and other Western societies. Based on a select number of representative texts and images, this course will be dealing with problems relating to imaging, imagining and contemplating war. Its main focus will be on images of war in the age of industrialization.