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 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 contest 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 medial 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 and experiences about the war.

This course will be collaborative and research-intensive as well as challenging, 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 explicate and analyze the course materials we will be reading; for example, students will be reading original news dispatches and stories published in the New Yorker articles by Mollie Panther-Downes, as there are too many to read, you will be assigned different reports and stories and asked to present them to the class. You will also be expected to do some work (including your 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 like 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.

This is a blended course. We will be meeting in person 7 times over the course of the summer term. These dates are May 12, May 26, June 2, June 16, June 23, July 7 and July 21. Attendance is mandatory on all of these dates. On June 2nd we will be visiting the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in Vancouver and on June 23rd we will be visiting the Joy Kogawa house in Vancouver. Please note that dates for these two off campus visits will be confirmed before we meet in May.

During the other weeks, you will be asked to engage in activities relevant to the course materials. There will be no synchronous meetings during these weeks and you will work independently. Most course content will be presented in the form of audio lectures, online, video, and archival materials, and you will be asked to engage in activities that involve research, synthesis of materials, critical analysis, creative projects and reflection.

Reading Schedule:

Week 1—May 12 (In Person):

Mollie Panter-Downes, “Letters from London,” New Yorker Magazine

Week 2—May 19 (Victoria Day):

Mollie Panter-Downes, “Letters from London,” New Yorker Magazine

Mollie Panter-Downes, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

Week 3—May 26 (In Person):

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Week 4—June 2 (In Person Visit to Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre): 

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Week 5—June 9:

Molly Lamb Bobak’s War Diary / Joy Kogawa, Obasan 

Week 6—June 16 (In Person):

Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Ruby Grierson, Children from Overseas (1940)

Week 7—June 23 (In Person visit to the Joy Kogawa House and UBC Special Collections):

Joy Kogawa, Obasan 

Week 8—June 30:

Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit (1971)

Week 9—July 7 (In Person):

Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit (1971)

Week 10—July 14:

Stories of Samira Azzam: “From Afar”; “The Rival”; “Another Year”; “On the way to Solomon’s Pools”

Week 11—July 21 (In Person):

Stories of Samira Azzam: “From Afar”; “The Rival”; “Another Year”; “On the way to Solomon’s Pools”

Week 12—July 28:

Mrs Miniver (1942)

 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: