How we see war—whether we see it through news reports, commentary, movies, literature, songs, advertisements, first-hand experience, or other means—has a direct effect upon how we understand and, from there, how we form our opinions about war. In this course, you will use your own writing to explore how various portrayals of war affect our understanding. Our primary focus will be on contemporary wars in which the United States is involved, but a thorough examination will require a wider, more historical context. Therefore, we will also consider portrayals of/from past wars and wars in which the United States has not been directly involved.
In engaging with a topic academically, you are also engaging with an ongoing conversation relating to that topic. With that in mind, your writing in this course will most often be a direct response to other pieces of the conversation. We will consider a range of primary and secondary sources: portrayals of war in a multitude of formats, and essays, criticism, and/or analyses of various portrayals. Most of the readings will be in the form of short, self-contained works or excerpts from longer works.
Academic writers do more than report—they synthesize information from a variety of sources and formulate informed opinions to be evaluated in the public sphere. To work towards this goal, you will write short responses (2-3 pages) to the readings and to class discussions, and your responses will often serve as the bases for new class discussions and, potentially, new directions for the readings. Formal writing assignments will include two mid-length papers (4-5 pages) and a longer, final project (8-10 pages). In the first paper, you will provide a rhetorical analysis and commentary based on your close “reading” of a military recruitment ad. You will draw on the skills you develop here for your second paper, an intertextual analysis of two different texts. Your goal for the final project will be to fully engage with the conversation on a sophisticated, informed, academic level through an essay that draws on all the skills we will have learned to that point. |
