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Aug 11, 2025
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2023-2024 Hill Book (Class of 2027) [ARCHIVED HILL BOOK]
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ENG 167 - The Art of Losing: British and Irish War Stories (Cornerstone Seminar)Three Credits
Periodically or As Needed
“My subject is War, and the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity.” Wilfred Owen planned to include these lines in the preface to his book of First World War poetry; they also appear on the stone commemorating Britain’s War Poets in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Yet this same sentiment prompted W.B. Yeats to say, “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.” Both writers assume there is a “right” way to turn the losses of war into literature,but disagree on the details. This course asks: How does literature help us to understand the experience of loss, particularly when that loss happens in the context of war? In what ways does literature encourage us to remember the past? Why do the losses of the First World War still appeal to contemporary writers as a subject for poetry, novels, and plays? Our reading of primary texts are supplemented by critical works that reveal the ways in which memory and commemoration changed after the First World War, in order to help us understand writers’ continual return to and reimagination of the years from 1914-1918. Only open to students that have not completed the Literature Cornerstone requirement.
General Education Attribute(s): First-Year Seminar, Literature Cornerstone
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