The American Trauma: Representing the Civil War in Art, Literature and Politics

3 units

This seminar is an interdisciplinary examination of how Americans represented the Civil War during and after the titanic conflict, with special attention given to the period between 1865 and 1915. The course explores how painters, novelists, photographers, sculptors, essayists, journalists, philosophers, historians, and filmmakers engaged the problems of constructing narrative and reconstructing national and individual identity out of the physical and psychological wreckage of a war which demanded horrific sacrifice and the destruction of an enemy that could not be readily dissociated from the self.