Courses

This seminar will explore recent writing about war and conflict from the perspective of combatants, civilians, embedded journalists, medics, military families, and veterans. Together we’ll read a range of contemporary novels, short stories, and reportage and examine how writers describe, critique, report, imagine, and experience war. The course will be organized into three sections: anticipating war, experiencing war, and returning from war. We’ll draw on canonical works of 20th century war literature by Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Tim O’Brien, and Michael Herr, and connect these works to writing about war and conflict from the 21st century. We’ll read fiction and reportage by Phil Klay, Viet Than Nguyen, Anna Burns, Salar Abdoh, C.J. Chivers, Matt Gallagher, Graham Barnhart, Ben Fountain, Teresa Fazio, Ahmed Saadawi, and Will Mackin, and others, as well as contemporary war poetry from the United States and Afghanistan.