Imagining War

War is one of the great themes in European literature. The greatest works of Greco-Roman antiquity are meditations on war; and as an organizing metaphor, war pervades our attempts to represent politics, economics, and sexuality. Efforts to comprehend war were the genesis of the disciplines of history and political science; and the disaster of the Peloponnesian War forms the critical, if concealed, background to the first great works of Western philosophy. We shall begin the first semester with readings from the Iliad, Thucydides, Plato, and Augustine. We shall go on to study the Aeneid, Machiavelli, Shakespeare’s Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, Henry V), and Hobbes. In the second semester, we shall look at the origins of political economy, among other things a discipline that sought to transcend the military metaphor; at Marxism, which remilitarized political economy; at Byron’s mock epic, Don Juan; and at two 19th-century novelists, Stendhal and Tolstoy—one of whom concerned himself with war directly; the other used it as an organizing metaphor for erotic and economic life. We will conclude with a look at some 20th-century literary, artistic, historical, and critical attempts to represent war with an allegedly unprecedented accuracy. This is an interdisciplinary course. Group conferences will usually be committed to works of modern scholarship, often by historians and social scientists. Both semesters’ reading lists are subject to revision.