Apr 19, 2024  
2012-2013 HillBook (Class of 2016) 
    
2012-2013 HillBook (Class of 2016) [ARCHIVED HILL BOOK]

ENG 121 - Violence and Nonviolence

Three Credits
Spring Semester

We only have to look around us to see that our world is defined in a fundamental way by violence. Writers and thinkers from various historical moments have both recognized the problem of violence in society and have offered critiques of it. Our study this term will be guided by the following question: what perspective does literature provide on the issues of violence and nonviolence in the world? We will encounter novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists whose work contains original, thought-provoking, and moving representations of and reflections on violence and nonviolence. We will pose a number of additional questions of our readings: how do these texts represent the causes and consequences of violence? How do the texts convey the relationships among different types of violence – interpersonal, political, psychological, and socioeconomic? Is nonviolence a viable ethical position in these texts? How is nonviolence defined, and what, if any, are the impediments to lessening the violence of the world? Lastly, what might the role of literature, and art more generally, be in our imagining of nonviolence?

Fulfills the Cornerstone Literature Requirement.