J298 Writings on War

War, once an alternative to peace, has increasingly come to supplant it. All these wars have in common the unprecedented difficulty of gaining access to them and somehow surviving to bring the stories back to the public. In this seminar we will address those difficulties, in part by studying the best contemporary war reporting available and in part by delving deep into how writers ancient and modern have written about the complicated phenomenon of war. Through our reading, analysis and discussion we will seek to discover how these wars have been covered, how they are being covered — and how they might be covered.