Spring 2024 Comparative Literature: English GU4771 section 001

The Literary History of Atrocity

The Literary Hist of Atro

Call Number 12314
Day & Time
Location
MW 10:10am-11:25am
330 Uris Hall
Points 3
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Bruce Robbins
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

Sometime around the publication of Garcia Marquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, novelists who wanted to make a claim to ethical and historical seriousness began to include a scene of extreme violence that, like the banana worker massacre in Garcia Marquez, seemed to offer a definitive guide to the moral landscape of the modern world. This course will explore both the modern literature that was inspired by Garcia Marquez’s example and the literature that led up to this extraordinary moment—for example, the literature dealing with the Holocaust, with the dropping of the atomic bomb, with the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, and with the Allied bombing of the German cities. It will also ask how extraordinary this moment in fact was, looked at from the perspective of literature as a whole, by inspecting earlier examples of atrocities committed in classical antiquity, in the Crusades, against Native Americans and (in Tolstoy) against the indigenous inhabitants of the Caucasus. Before the concept of the non-combatant had been defined, could there be a concept of the atrocity? Could a culture accuse itself of misconduct toward the members of some other culture? In posing these and related questions, the course offers itself as a major but untold chapter both in world literature and in the moral history of humankind.

Web Site Vergil
Department English and Comparative Literature
Enrollment 43 students (60 max) as of 9:05PM Monday, December 2, 2024
Subject Comparative Literature: English
Number GU4771
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Section key 20241CLEN4771W001