2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Mar 06, 2026

2024-2025 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 218 - War and Its Aftermath in American Literature & Culture

In the twenty-first century, war is an omnipresent feature of lived experience and/or the media people consume. This course prompts students to reflect critically on this reality and evaluate historical changes in representations of war and its legacies. It asks, how have war and its aftereffects been promoted, resisted, recorded, and/or reimagined in American literature, film, visual art, and other cultural artifacts? Within contexts such as the Civil War and World War II, as well as the ongoing event of militarization, we will analyze authors’ creative representations of issues like nationalism, citizenship, political activism, colonialism, mental illness, gender, racism, and the conflict between official and unofficial renderings of history. Course materials might include works by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Loreta Janeta Velázquez, Stephen Crane, Alice Dunbar Nelson, John Okada, Miné Okubo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Craig Santos Perez, and Grace Cho. For English majors, this course satisfies the D-2 or D-3 requirement but cannot double count.

Prerequisites: 100-level ENG course. Students who have taken a course in literature in a foreign language (e.g. Spanish, French, Japanese) at the 100-level may be admitted to the class with instructor permission.

Course Designation/Attribute: WE,VE,DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually