Handbook

War literature and film explores the human dimension of war, asking what it means to fight, to suffer and to remember wars. Focussing, therefore, on the personal experience of soldiers and civilians caught up in conflicts, this course is a study of selected war literature and films from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. It examines key questions about how war and its often terrifying violence have been represented; how authors and film makers have managed to convey the shifting character of modern war; and how texts about war portray the complex relationships between civilian and military worlds. Concepts and issues examined will include violence, pain and trauma, experience, the fragile body at war, military occupation, civilians in wartime, comradeship, masculinity, media forms and representations of the soldier and the enemy.

The course is worth 6 units of credit in the English and Media Studies program.