English 511
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ENGL 511: The Literature of World War IMichael Ferber |
Students will read novels and poetry by several authors, most of whom fought in "The Great War," and most of whom are English. The tentative reading list will include:
-Poetry by Rupert Brook (who went to Cambridge), Siegried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and other Englishmen
-Erich Maria Remarque (German), All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
-Ernest Hemingway (American), A Farewell to Arms (1929)
-Virginia Woolf (who had many Cambridge connections), Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
-Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)
Since next year will begin the centennial of the War, students will also read a book about war memorials (probably Geoff Dyer's The Missing of the Somme), and take a look at some of the memorials in Cambridge and London.
This course may be used to satisfy the UNH Humanities and WI Discovery requirements or a Category 8 general education requirement.
Michael Ferber is a professor of English and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire, where he has been teaching since 1987. He has also been an assistant professor at Yale. He earned his BA in Greek from Swarthmore College and his PhD in English from Harvard (1975). He was a draft-resister during the Vietnam War and co-authored a book about the anti-draft movement; in the 1980s he worked for five years in Washington on arms control and nuclear disarmament.
Ferber has published two books about William Blake, one about PB Shelley, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge, second edition 2007), an anthology of European Romantic Poetry, The Blackwell Companion to European Romanticism, Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford), and The Cambridge Introduction to British Romanticism.