Women Write War

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Women have a long history of participating in war—as its witnesses, victims, implicated subjects, pacifist activists, medical personnel, soldiers, leaders, among many other roles. This course examines women writers’ and artists’ experience of war, focusing on the violent conflicts that have ravaged Eastern Europe. Students examine poetry, prose, journalism, memoirs, films, artists’ books, and other visual media created by women from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, the former Yugoslavia, and other countries. The course begins with the contemporary Russo-Ukrainian War and then moves backwards in time to the violent conflicts of the 1990s that emerged as a result of the dissolution of the Socialist Bloc, the two world wars, all the way to the Napoleonic Wars. We ask: in what ways do sex and gender affect the variety of positions that women artists and writers take on the traumatic history of war? how do they process their own involvement, direct or indirect, in violent conflict? Among other ethically loaded issues, we consider the influence of broader ideologies (Liberalism, Marxism, Nazism) on women’s pacifist or militarist positions.