Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Study of the relation of literature and media (manuscript, print, visual, aural, digital, and/or oral) within their cultural and/or performative contexts. May be further organized by methodology (e.g. book history, textual scholarship, media studies, adaptation studies, digital humanities), historical period, or genre. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Women and World War II Across Media

This course offers an exploration of how women responded—first to the threat, then to the reality, and finally to the aftermath—of the Second World War in Europe. It examines a handful of women's reflections, depictions, and reporting on the War, across a variety of genres and media, both private and public. We will examine the diaries and memoirs they wrote (and often illustrated), the magazine and newspaper reports they filed, and the fiction, essays, and films they created to describe the war, to support the war effort, and to lament the horrors of war. We will pay particular attention to the material history of the works we are studying: the circumstances of their composition and creation; the surviving archive, including the manuscripts, original drawings, magazine articles, and early print editions in which their work circulated; the multimedia aspects of their compositions; and the transformations of their work as it migrated across various media and to different and broader audiences. Throughout, we will be asking about how women convey their perspectives on and experiences of the war.

 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

This course will be collaborative and research-intensive, as well as affectively challenging in terms of the subject matter, as we critically interrogate our materials dealing with the harrowing reality of war. This course will be collaborative, in that we will be working together to find some the course materials we will be reading; for example, students will be asked to find the original New Yorker articles in which Mollie Panter-Downes' dispatches from London and stories appeared. You will also be expected to do some work (including an archival presentation) with other students, and you are invited (but not required) to do your major assignments in partnership with other students. This course will ask you to engage in original research, as we will be studying materials (such as Molly Lamb Bobak’s illustrated war diary) that are available only in digital form and have received very little scholarly attention. This course will develop your critical capacities. For example, we will be destabilizing the idea of a fixed text, by exploring the many different versions of Anne Frank’s diary and considering how it transitioned from manuscript to print. Finally, this course will present us with disturbing and inevitably challenging subject matter.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Most of the course readings are out of print or difficult to access and will be made available on canvas or through SFU OneDrive. Students are urged however to purchase the following two books:

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. [Please purchase the “Definitive” edition. This edition is currently a good deal on Amazon: ISBN: 0307594009.]

Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit Harper Collins, 2017. ISBN:‎ 0007274777

A fuller list of the course reading and a tentative schedule is listed below under required reading.

REQUIRED READING: