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The Second World War in American Fiction

English 380

Fall 2006

John M. Krafft

Office:             224 Rentschler Hall

Office Hours:

            Mon.    1:00– 2:00

            Tue.     2:30– 3:30

            Wed.   10:30–11:15

            Thu.     10:00–11:15

            And by appointment

Office Phone:   785–3031

Home Phone:   868–2330 (Call me at home at any time for any reason.)

E-mail:              krafftjm@muohio.edu

WWW:              <http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm>

The Second World War (1939–1945) is arguably the most decisive event of the twentieth century in shaping the social and economic contours of the United States (and Europe) as we know it even today, and in determining the status and role of the United States in the world. More than sixty years after the fact, ordinary citizens as well as professional scholars maintain a widespread and profound interest in the history per se of that war. Fiction writers, too, reflecting imaginatively on the experience of that war--"bringing the past to life as the prehistory of the present . . . giving poetic life to those historical, social and human forces which . . . have made our presentday life what it is," in Georg Lukács's words--can help us understand its causes, meanings and effects in ways that supplement and extend what we can learn from historians. Indeed, novels about the Second World War have been among the most popular and influential of the postwar period. We will examine a variety of such texts (supplemented by selections from the work of at least one professional historian and from a collection of oral histories) and interrogate what fiction has to show us about history, how it does so, and how well. Thus a principal purpose of the course is precisely the Miami Plan goal of understanding contexts--the historically determined socioeconomic and political, domestic and international contexts of the increasingly globalized life we experience today, all as refracted through fiction.

Some preparation in twentieth-century American or European history and geopolitics will be an asset; at the same time, history-savvy students will experience how fiction extends the substance and problematizes the assumptions of traditional histories. Similarly, some familiarity with postmodern literature will be an asset, even though students will have to ponder the truth claims of a form notorious for a nearly categorical skepticism. Here, then, understanding historiographical and literary contexts intersects with critical thinking.

Texts:

Philip Roth, "Defender of the Faith" (handout)

J. D. Salinger, "To Esmé--with Love and Squalor" (handout)

Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945

Michael J. Lyons, World War II: A Short History , 4th ed.

Studs Terkel, The "Good War"

If you don't already have a collegiate dictionary and an up-to-date English handbook or style manual (such as the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers ) with a section on research and documentation, you will need both.

Syllabus:

I have made a few assignments from Lyons, Terkel and Hastings, and I will make more as need dictates and time allows. But feel free to consult them (and to recommend other sources) anytime for reference, background, context and contrast.

Wed. 8/23—   Introduction to the course

Mon. 8/28—   Roth, "Defender of the Faith" (handout); Salinger, "To Esmé--with Love and Squalor" (handout)*

Wed. 8/30—   Lyons, World War ii , pages 1-65

Mon. 9/ 4—   No class

Tue. 9/ 5—   Monday-Tuesday exchange: this class meets: Arnow, The Dollmaker

Wed. 9/ 6—   Arnow cont.; first response paper due

Mon. 9/11—   Arnow cont.

Wed. 9/13—   Arnow cont.; Terkel, the "Good War," 108ff., 135ff.*

Mon. 9/18—   Heller, Catch-22

Wed. 9/20—   Heller cont.; second response paper due

Mon. 9/25—   Heller cont.

Wed. 9/27—   Heller cont.; Lyons 205-13, 226-36; Terkel 301ff.*

Mon. 10/ 2—   Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five ; third response paper due

Wed. 10/ 4—   Vonnegut cont.; Hastings, Armageddon , 298-337

Mon. 10/ 9—   Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow , Part 1

Wed. 10/11—    GR Pt1 cont.*

Mon. 10/16—   Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow , Part 2; fourth response paper due

Wed. 10/18—    GR pt2 cont.

Mon. 10/23—   Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow , Part 3*

Wed. 10/25—    GR Pt3 cont.; Hastings 418ff.

Mon. 10/30—    GR Pt3 cont.; fifth response paper due

Wed. 11/ 1—   Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow , Part 4

Mon. 11/ 6—    GR Pt4 cont.

Wed. 11/ 8—    GR Pt4 cont.; research paper due

Mon. 11/13—   Piercy, Gone to Soldiers , through "Louise 4"*

Wed. 11/15—   Piercy cont.; Terkel 59ff., 318ff.

Mon. 11/20—   Piercy, Gone to Soldiers , through "Jeff 8"; sixth response paper due

Wed. 11/22—   Thanksgiving break

Mon. 11/27—   Piercy cont.; Terkel 350ff., 459ff.

Wed. 11/29—   Piercy, Gone to Soldiers , to the end*

Mon. 12/ 4—   Piercy cont.

Wed. 12/ 6—   Wrap-up*

Finals week, 12/11– —   Term projects due, day and time tba

Requirements:

1. Punctual completion of all assigned reading.

For class discussion to succeed, you need to have completed reading each novel (or any assignment) by the time we begin discussing it, since you can hardly discuss intelligently what you haven't read in its entirety. I have, however, made a concession to practicality by assigning Pynchon and Piercy a (novel-length) part at a time. Still, ideally, you should be re reading Gravity's Rainbow in particular by the time we get to it; we will focus on one part at a time, but we can't avoid looking ahead as well. So if you haven't already done so, try to complete at least a cursory first reading of Gravity's Rainbow as early as possible.

In case discussions spill over their scheduled dates, please also bring the previous book (or handout) to a class in which we are scheduled to begin discussing a new work.

2. Informed and thoughtful participation in class discussion.

To spur your preparation and participation, I ask you to submit a short interpretive question on the reading, or a brief historical-research observation related to it during most weeks when a response paper is not due. Turn in your question or observation (word processed, not hand written) at the start of each class marked on the syllabus with an asterisk. Also send it as a simple e-mail message, not a file attachment, to the class e-mail list before class. These questions and observations will not be graded individually but are important to your class participation, so be prepared to present your question or observation to the class--possibly even at a subsequent meeting. Besides spurring your engagement in learning with your classmates (to whom you are responsible for being thoughtful and informative, and from whom you will also learn by teaching), this requirement is intended to promote critical thinking. So pose questions that reasonable people can disagree about, and offer historical observations that are not mere casually Googled factoids but have some reflective or interpretive value added.

3. Satisfactory and punctual completion of all writing assignments: six 1–2-page response papers, a 5–7-page research paper (or an equivalent research presentation) and a 10–12-page term project. These assignments, too, are intended to promote critical thinking (including critical thinking about the processes of writing, facilitated by feedback on the increasingly sophisticated projects) and the reflection that can lead to effective action: see the section "Papers" below.

You will turn in your papers by e-mail as attached Word (.doc) files. (I will return them as printouts.) Follow standard formatting guidelines as if you were handing in hard copy. That is, double space, leave a one-inch margin all around, and so on. Please put your name at the very top of any paper you send me (even if you also include your name in a header or footer), flush left, with no blank lines above it and with nothing else on that first line.

Papers must be well organized, adequately developed, coherent and substantially error-free in typography, spelling, grammar, mechanics and usage, and must be documented (notes and works-cited list) in correct form as appropriate. Poorly written work will be marked down accordingly.

Late work will be marked down one letter for every day it is late--unless, of course, we have reached an agreement about it ahead of time. If you have a problem with the due date of a paper, discuss it with me outside class before the paper is due.

4. Regular and punctual attendance.

Since the class is based on discussion, we need you. If you know you must miss a class, let me know in advance, if only for courtesy's sake, since not getting in touch does send a message. Even illness is not an automatic excuse, especially if you don't call or e-mail me.

If you miss more than two classes (especially without notifying me), I may have to consider you ineligible to pass the course. (According to university policy, absence for certain religious observances is not an attendance issue as discussed here: see MUPIM 10.1.)

Note: If you carry a pager or a phone, turn it off (don't just set it to vibrate) before class begins.

Grading:

Response papers:   25%

Research paper/presentation:   25%

Term project:   35%

Class participation:   15%

Papers:

1. I ask for six brief (300-500 words each) response papers on relevant topics of your choice, due on the dates noted on the syllabus. These papers can raise questions of fact or interpretation, wrestle with problems, identify significant (literary, cultural or historical) issues or (textual) patterns, experiment with possible readings, even sketch prospective research projects. Tentative as they may be, they should demonstrate careful reading and close engagement with the texts. To make your responses interesting and meaningful to your readers, you should provide some specific textual evidence or other basis for what you say instead of merely saying what you feel or think. That goes as well even for the problems you may have (and you don't have to have all the answers). Feel free to raise the issues or draw attention to the problems in class discussion before or after you write about them. In fact, you should always bring your papers with you in case I ask you to read from them to the class. (We may also set up an online library of everyone's response papers.)

You may collaborate with a classmate on a response paper by coauthoring a mini essay of three to four pages.

I will mark each response paper either credit or no-credit and convert the total credit to a letter-grade equivalent at the end of the term.

2. You may either write a short research paper (5–7 pages) or make a presentation to the class (20-25 minutes) based on your research into a relevant historical topic--such as German films and/as Nazi propaganda, the Holocaust, strategic and terror weapons, differences between U.S. and British war aims, military discipline or draft resistance, Rosie the Riveter, the U.S. war economy and related sociopolitical transformations, the French Resistance, the bombing of Dresden, the Yalta agreement or the Potsdam conference, the origins of the Cold War, or the American occupation of Germany and the so-called economic miracle of German recovery--or into a relevant theoretical issue--such as objectivism, constructivism or historiographic metafiction in the writing of history, fiction and/or historical fiction. If you do a presentation, please provide some sort of documentary support: for instance, a handout including an outline, illustrations, a bibliography, and so on. The due date for research papers is November 8 (unless we negotiate a later date), but of course they can be handed in earlier. If you do a presentation instead, when you do it will depend on when your topic is most relevant to class discussion.

Focus on a subject such as the Spanish Civil War as a rehearsal for the Second World War, or the northward migration of southerners seeking war work, or the strategies of the air war, or the treatment of POWs or the fate of displaced persons (those are just more examples) that is important in--or important to our understanding of--one or more of the works we read. Pick a subject that, ideally, you are interested in and think others would be interested in if they knew more about it or realized how crucial it was to appreciating the text(s). Investigate and present your subject in its own right, and show how it relates to the work. Although there is no right or wrong about the exact proportions here, consider focusing mainly on the subject itself (explaining it, giving the history or other background, discussing any theoretical underpinnings or any controversy surrounding it, and so on), as a way of providing readers with tools or resources they need, and then demonstrating some application to the fiction (one text, part of one text, or several texts). Of course, you might want to arouse interest by starting with the application and then turn to filling in the broader technical, historical or theoretical details beyond the fiction. Your purpose is to illuminate the fiction, make it more meaningful, for readers who haven't done the research you have but can benefit from your having done it. If you do a research presentation instead of a paper, your topic should be clearly relevant to the text we are discussing at the time.

3. You will write a seminar paper or term project of 10–12 pages. It may, but need not, grow out of either a response-paper topic or your research topic. For instance, you could do a research paper on feminism that was mostly about feminist politics or literary theory, but with some attention to Arnow's or Heller's novel, suggesting the relevance of feminism to understanding characterization or sex roles in the fiction; then your term project could be a full-dress application of the theory to the fiction, illuminating it, critiquing it, or the like. Or you could do a research paper on the devastation of London, Germany (Pynchon, Piercy) or Italy (Heller) that was mostly about the factual basis of the fictional portrayal rather than about the portrayal itself; then your term project could be an analysis of the author's critique, from the postwar vantage, of how the war (how wars) fueled a spectacular economic boom. Or your research project could investigate Walter Dornberger and/or Wernher von Braun as models for characters in Pynchon, and your term paper could then explore Pynchon's use of these characters to comment on how the United States sanitized the past of selected war criminals and then turned them into heroes of the Cold War. Again, though, your research and term projects need not be linked.

Term projects do, however, necessarily involve a research component, if only so you will know what else has been written about your subject; but they are likely to focus more directly than research projects on the fiction itself. They are opportunities to do some practical criticism or applied theory.

Term projects may deal partly or wholly with fiction of the Second World War that is not on the course syllabus (including fiction by non-American writers), or even with war poetry. Fiction about other wars, and war movies are possible topics as well.

4. I will be happy to discuss possible topics for your papers at any time, in person or by phone or e-mail. Indeed, I expect to consult with you about your research and term projects well in advance. Please be sure you have my approval for a topic and approach before you go too far. I don't expect to have to resort to requiring and vetting written proposals, but I will if people seem to need that push.

5. Here are a few guidelines about doing research. 1) Do not rely only on web-based research resources, and carefully evaluate those you do use. Some are excellent, but many are untrustworthy or insufficiently scholarly. 2) On or off the web, do not rely only on digests, summaries, compilations, reviews, popularizations or the like. Let such works lead you to their scholarly and primary sources. 3) Use sources that are up to date, verifiable, as unbiased as possible, and authoritative. Beware of anonymous ones. 4) Read what you write about: don't just read about it.

6. Little of our language and few of our ideas can ever be entirely original; but there are uses of other people's words, ideas and findings that we are ethically obliged to acknowledge. When you do research and your work is influenced by it (when you quote, paraphrase, summarize or borrow information or ideas--and this goes even for the discussions in textbooks and reference works), you must acknowledge your intellectual debts, explicitly in the body of your essay, in notes, and/or in a works-cited list. Otherwise, you may be guilty of plagiarism. Formal research is only an example; you can incur the same obligation informally by reading the newspaper or surfing the web. So even if you think you already know what plagiarism is, see The Miami Bulletin: The Student Handbook (available in hard copy or online <http://www.miami.muohio.edu/documents_and_policies/handbook/academic_regulations/acadregspv.cfm>) on the meaning and consequences of academic misconduct. Plagiarism is among the most serious, most contemptible, most intolerable of academic offenses. Don't risk it. Carefully document your references to the literature you write about and to any historical, cultural, critical or other sources you use in MLA style.

7. E-mail your papers to me as attached Word (.doc) files. Don't cut-and-paste or type them directly into e-mail messages, or send files in other formats-- Works (.wps), for example--since I might not be able to open them. That doesn't mean you have to use Word to create your files; most word processing programs let you save in other formats. If you don't use Word , when you are ready to send me a file, use the "Save as" function (accessible from the File menu) to save a copy in Word format.

The "Save as" function also gives you the opportunity to change your file's name. Change it from whatever you called it as you worked on it to a file name consisting of 1) your last name, and 2) the identifying tag "term" or "research" or "response x ," depending on whether you are sending me your final term project, your research paper or a response paper. Notes: a) Omit the quotation marks around the tag words specified in the previous sentence; b) in the case of a response paper, substitute the number of the response-paper assignment for the x ; c) your word processor will almost certainly add .doc to the file name. File names should look like this: krafft term.doc; krafft research.doc; krafft response3.doc. Send me only files with names constructed on that model. (If two or more students have the same last name, they should use their MUNet user IDs instead as the first element in their file names.)

I ask you to follow that file-naming scheme for my convenience and protection. To avoid confusion and the risk of viruses, I will delete files I can't immediately identify by the sender's last name, including files with descriptive names like "English paper," "Heller essay" or "Espionage and Resistance in _Gone to Soldiers_." So for your protection, always follow the instructions above.

E-Mail:

1. Even if you don't ordinarily use or don't plan to use your Miami e-mail account, please be sure it is set up, since your Miami address is the one I will use when I need to e-mail you. If you would rather use a non-Miami e-mail service (AOL or Yahoo or Hotmail, for instance), configure your entry in the university directory <http://www.muohio.edu/ph> so any mail sent to your Miami address will be forwarded to the address you prefer. I can reply to a message from any address, but please do not ask me to initiate a message to you at a non-Miami address.

2. Set your mail program to display your real name, not just your e-mail address, in messages you send. (In Eudora , go to Tools, to Options, to Getting Started, to Real Name; in SquirrelMail , go to Options, to Personal Information, to Full Name. If you use a different mail program or service, learn and follow its procedure for displaying your real name.) Your real name makes your mail instantly recognizable--and less likely to be mistaken for spam. If you would rather be Peggy Jones than Margaret Jones, or Bob Smith than Robert Smith, that's fine; but if you write as Pinky or The Hulk or eagle273 or your father's girlfriend, I won't know who you are and may not think finding out is urgent.

3. Check your e-mail regularly.

4. Your Miami address has been automatically subscribed to the listserve list ENG380SHH@majordomo.ham.muohio.edu for class-related discussion. For those who want to use it, the list is a convenient forum for sharing information and for testing and refining ideas, but no one is required to post to it except as noted under Requirement 2 above. I may post announcements, modifications to assignments, readings or the like. And (unless we set up a website for all response papers) I may occasionally ask permission to post, or ask the writer to post, an especially provocative response paper.

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