Lent Term 2013

Sacrifice in Film and Literature since WWII

Location: TBC

Six classes. Weeks 2-7

• Seminar 1: World War II

• Seminar 2: The Vietnam War

• Seminar 3: The Cold War

• Seminar 4: The 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland

• Seminar 5: The Israel/Palestine Conflict

• Seminar 6: September 11 and the War on Terror

This course will examine how a range of writers and film directors have figured political conflict since World War II in terms of sacrifice. In looking at depictions of various confrontations—particularly the Vietnam War, Cold War, and War on Terror—we will consider how such conflicts have been viewed as battles over the nature and justification of sacrifice. This will raise a number of related issues: oppositions between secular and religious struggle; different types of sacrificial exchange; sacrifice as production of intimacy with god, community, or death. Numerous thinkers have written about substitution and exchange as being crucial in sacrificial work—whether in terms of a victim standing for a community, or the profane becoming sacred. Special attention will be given to those matters in terms of how they bear on literary and filmic figuration, particularly synecdoche, symbolism, metaphor, myth, and realism.

Students who wish to write in their course essay on relevant texts other than those prescribed or suggested in the module may do so, but should discuss this with the course convenor first. Please note that course essays should bear a clear and evident relation to the main focal themes of the course.

Each week students are required to write a short response (around 250 words) to the set reading and/or viewing. The response doesn’t need to be beautifully crafted, and can be a list of points and questions. When referring to a text, please include page numbers. You are required to email each week’s response to me by 12 noon on the day before the seminar<ah217@cam.ac.uk>. I will then gather the responses and email them to everyone as a single document. The responses will be used to foster discussion in and out of the seminars, and will serve as a collective diary of notes and queries.

Reading and viewing

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961) & Mike Nichols, Catch-22 (1970)

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) & Michael Radford, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Seamus Heaney, North (1975)

Steve McQueen, Hunger (2008)

Hanu Abu-Assad, Paradise Now (2005)

Yasmina Khadra, The Attack (2006)

Paul Greengrass, United 93 (2006)

Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007)

Background reading

Johannes de Silentio [Soren Kierkegaard], Fear and Trembling (1843)

Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1898)

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939)

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972)

Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1973)

Mehdi Abedi and Gary Legenhausen, eds., Jihad and Shahadat: Struggle and Martyrdom in Islam (1986)

S. W. Sykes, ed., Sacrifice and Redemption (1991)

Andrew Chandler, Terrible Alternative: Christian Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century (1998)

Johan Leemans, ed., More than a Memory: The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Christian Identity in the the History of Christianity (Leuven: Peeters, 2005)

David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam (CUP, 2007)

Class 1. WORLD WAR II

Set reading

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

Set viewing

Mike Nichols, Catch-22 (1970)

Set theory

Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (2012), Part II

 

Related reading

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943)
Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (1948)
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Curzio Malaparte, The Skin [La Pelle] (1949)
Elizabeth Bowen, Heat of the Day (1949)
Colin McDougall, Execution (1958)
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (1979)

Related viewing

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salo, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom](1975)
Alan J. Pakula, Sophie’s Choice (1982)
Christopher Morahan, Heat of the Day (1989)
Michael Bay, Pearl Harbor (2001)
Rachid Bouchareb, Indigènes [Days of Glory] (2006)

Related criticism and theory

Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 (1989)
Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (1989)
Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-45 (1995)
Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II (1999)
Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (2000)
James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-45 (2000)
Christopher Lloyd, Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France: Representing Treason and Sacrifice (2003)
Michael Paris, Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television (2007)
Marina Mackay, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Second World War (2009)
Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (2007), ch. 15.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998)

Class 2. THE VIETNAM WAR

Set reading

Allen Ginsberg, Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966), in The Fall of America (1975)

Set viewing

Michael Cimino, The Deer Hunter (1978)

Set theory

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (1992), chap. 4

Related reading

Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)
Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow (1968)
Denise Levertov, The Freeing of the Dust (1975)
Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977)
Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers (1979)

Related viewing

Joseph L. Mankiewicz The Quiet American (1958)
Oliver Stone, Platoon (1986)
Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket (1987) [film adaptation of Hasford’s The Short-Timers]
Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001)

Related criticism and theory

Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (1991)
Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946-1975 (1988)
Michael Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television (1991)
Jean-Jacques Malo and Tony Williams, Vietnam War Films (1994)
Michael Bibby, Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (1996)
Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (2001)
Mark Taylor, The Vietnam War in History, Literature, and Film (2003)

Class 3. THE COLD WAR

Set reading

Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958)

Set viewing

Sidney Lumet, Fail-Safe (1964)

Set theory

Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 20-38 [available on JSTOR]

Related reading

Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe (1963)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957)
John le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963)
———. The Human Factor (1979)
William Prochnau, Trinity’s Child (1983)

Related viewing

Stanley Kramer, On the Beach (1959)
Carol Reed, Our Man in Havana (1959)
Stanley Kubrick, Dr Strangelove (1964)
Martin Ritt, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965)
Otto Preminger, The Human Factor (1979)
Michael Radford, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Andrei Tarkovsky, Offret [The Sacrifice] (1986)
Jack Sholder, By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) [adaptation of Prochnau’s Trinity’s Child]

Related criticism and theory

Paul Rogers, Malcolm Dando, Peter van den Dung1en, As Lambs to the Slaughter: The Facts about Nuclear War (1981)
Thomas Hill Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War (1991)
David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War (1999)
Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (1987)
Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry (2001)
Andrew Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature (2005)
Adam Piette, Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (2009)
Richard Alan Schwartz, Cold War Culture: Media and the Arts, 1945-90 (1998)
Jerome Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (2002)
M. Keith Booker, From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film (2007)
Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War : the American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (2010)

Class 4. THE 'TROUBLES' IN NORTHERN IRELAND

Set reading

Seamus Heaney, North (1975)

Set viewing

Steve McQueen, Hunger (2008)

Set theory

René Girard, The Scapegoat (1986), chaps 2 and 10

Related reading

Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti (1993)
Patrick McCabe, Butcher Boy (1992)
Eoin McNamee, Resurrection Man (1994)

Related viewing

Jim Sheridan, In the Name of the Father (1993)
Neil Jordan, Butcher Boy (1997)
Marc Evans, Resurrection Man (1998)

Related criticism and theory

Jack Holland, Too Long a Sacrifice: Life and Death in Northern Ireland since 1969 (1981)
John M. Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland (1983)
Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991)
Maud Ellman, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (1993)
Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993)
Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965 (1993)
Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (2000)
Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) [Online archive on the Troubles]

Class 5. ISRAEL/PALESTINE CONFLICT

Set reading

Joe Sacco, Palestine [graphic novel](2001)

Set viewing

James Miller, Death in Gaza [documentary] (2004)

Set theory

Jeremy Fernando, The Suicide Bomber and her Gift of Death (2010), chap. 4

Related reading

Amos Oz, A Perfect Peace (1982)
——. Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966)
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (1997)
Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun, and Other Palestinian Stories (1998)
Yasmina Khadra [Mohammed Moulleshoul], The Attack (2006) [orig. published as L’attentat (2005)]

Related viewing

Mohammed Bakri, Jenin, Jenin [documentary] (2002)
Steven Spielberg, Munich (2005)
Hanu Abu-Assad, Paradise Now (2005)

Related criticism and theory

Ami Elad-Bouskila, Modern Palestinian Literature and Culture (1999)
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (1979)
---. The Politics of Dispossession: the Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-94 (1994)
Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2002)
Meir Hattani, Theology and Power in the Middle East: Palestinian Martyrdom in a Comparative Perspective, Journal of Political Ideologies, 10 (October 2005): 241-67
Anne-Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, The Road to Martyr's Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (2005)
Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (2005)
Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg, eds, Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (2005)

Class 6. 9/11 and the WAR ON TERROR

Set reading

Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (2008)

Set viewing

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker (2008)

Set theory

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002)
Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (2007), chap. 2

Related reading

Ulrich Baer, ed., 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 (2002)
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007)
Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005)
John Updike, The Terrorist (2006)
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11: 2001-2007 (2008)

Related viewing

Paul Greengrass, United 93 (2006)
Oliver Stone, World Trade Center (2006)
Paul Haggis, In the Valley of Elah (2007)
Gavin Hood, Rendition (2007)
Brian de Palma Redacted (2007)
Francis Lawrence, I am Legend (2007)
Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler (2008)

Related criticism and theory

Mehdi Abedi and Gary Legenhausen, eds., Jihad and Shahadat: Struggle and Martyrdom in Islam (Houston: The Institute for Research and Islamic Studies, 1986)
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (2002)
Paul Virilio, Ground Zero (2002)
Ivan Strenski, “Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim ‘Human Bombers,’” Terrorism and Political Violence 15:3 (Autumn 2003): 1-34
Joan Didion, Fixed Ideas: America since 9.11 (2003)
Wheeler Winston Dixon, ed., Film and Television after 9/11 (2004)
Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin, eds., Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (2006)
Susan Willis, Portents of the Real: A Primer for Post-9/11 America (2005)
Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (2005)