Course Overview and Description of Assignments

This course seeks to understand identity through selective texts that document some of the extreme experiences of the past century. By looking at various media, we’ll explore the intersections of personal and collective memory, the problem of representing often indescribable experiences, the ethics of witnessing, and the almost universal experience of violence that defines much of the 20th century. We will attempt to investigate the perspectives of different cultural and national reactions in our attempt understand what precisely defines human identity.
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Inevitably, the course will reflect an American point of view due to our class geography and the English language bias of our materials—from this position, I hope we can bring together our combined diversity and knowledge to substantively complement, enrich, refocus, and revise what we hear, say, read, and think.


Course Goals

The goals for this course are propelled by two projects:

a) to understand better our human identity through the extreme accounts of war and terror experienced by individual persons in the past century, and remembered by people in this one.

b) to develop a personal philosophy, through writing, about the many ways we conceptualize human identity through our investigation into global memory, information technology, ethics and human rights, cultural narratives, and the experience of trauma. Your philosophy will depend, in part, on how you mediate and interpret textual meaning through photography, film, reading, and writing.

In order to pursue these goals practically and responsibly, we will view, read, and discuss a wide variety of texts and selections of texts, including memoirs, essays, short stories, novels, photographs, films, and websites.

Every time you encounter a text in the course, you should mentally or physically record, highlight, and/or respond to those ideas that strike you, challenge you, bother you, upset you, anger you, excite you, and/or bore you. You will explore your feelings about these texts in writing, and attempt to develop thoughtful responses that analyze, explain, and find relationships between the text and ideas you find meaningful or relevant, either in other texts, in the news, in your life, in your family, in your experiences, or in other classes you’ve taken—anywhere and everywhere.