War

More than a century ago, the mass scale of modern industrial warfare seemed to mark a break in Western philosophy and literature. Innovative theoretical analyses and a new, self-conscious genre of “war poetry” emerged to engage with the consequences of the mass slaughter, concerned with such topics as nihilism, the limits of empathy, and the discontinuity of experience. These issues only intensified after the Second World War and have remained pressing. We will read representative texts from the First World War to the present, exploring such issues as the linguistic representation of war, the problem of visibility, and the civilian-military divide.