This mock seminar is open to all Columbia affiliates and neighbors and will meet every Thursday in July from 5:30 - 7 p.m. Refreshments will be served.
Note: Separate registration is required for each session.
Sponsored by the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration.
Description: How do we talk about war? This seminar investigates some literary and historical engagements with the war story—not just tales of battlefield suffering or heroics, but stories about telling war stories. Over the course of four weeks, we’ll read poems and essays, selections from novels and plays, short stories and memoirs—all interested in some way with how soldiers and civilians alike grapple with war and its aftereffects. We’ll consider literary and cultural reactions to warfare from the Trojan War to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Along the way, we’ll ask: What makes a good war story? Who tells these stories? How can reading and thinking about old war stories shape the ways we tell new ones or understand our own?
July 6: Introductions & the Return from Troy
- Selections from Homer's The Odyssey
- Phil Klay, “Fact and Fiction,” from Uncertain Ground
July 13: Beyond the Band of Brothers: War in Shakespeare
- Selections from William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry V
- Selections from George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here
July 20: Homefront and Front Line
- Jessie Pope's “The Call”
- Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”
- Selections from “Tuesday, and After” (The New Yorker, Sept. 16, 2001)
- Selections from Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
July 27: Talking About War
- Selections from Sophocles’s Philoctetes
- Tim O’Brien's “How to Tell a True War Story” from The Things They Carried
About the Instructor:
Nick Utzig is a lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. He received his PhD from Harvard University, where his research focused on war in English Renaissance literature. Nick is currently working on a book on representations of the return from war in Shakespearean drama. Before his PhD, Nick was a US Army aviation officer and served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He lives in Westchester with his wife and two children.
