Human Rights and Violence in War and Peace

Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen: Spring Semester, 2018

Course Code: AN32005BA

Course for 3rd-year BA students: American Studies and the British Literature and Culture tracks

Tuesdays: 10:00 -11:40, Room: 119

Instructor: Thomas Peak, Visiting Lecturer ()

Office Hours: Tuesday: 14:00 -15:00, Room: 118

Course description

The purpose of this seminar course is to introduce students to some aspects of changing cultural perspectives on issues of ‘human rights’, ‘war/peace’, and violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Anglosphere. These issues will primarily be approached through written and visual cultural representations, but formal documents and theoretical texts are introduced when necessary. As a course available both on the British and American Studies tracks, we will cover material from both sides of the Atlantic. Beginning with the ‘horrors of war’ encountered in the trenches and the traumas of World War I, the course goes on to consider the development and emergence of human rights both within the Anglophone nations and in regard to their international relations. Texts are read primarily from a cultural perspective, focusing on the manner they interact with historical, social, and political phenomena.

As this seminar course is intended for third year BA candidates, students will be expected to bring independent perspectives and knowledge of historical and socio-political developments, drawn from other courses and outside reading.

Assessment (percentage of final grade)

40% - Project (group-based book review/ film review)

Group project to be completed outside the classroom. Groups will take turns to present their projects to the class in the final week of the course.

Each group will choose either a book, film or other source from the listed course materials or suggest their own material based on the structure of the course and following approval from the instructor. Groups are expected to co-operate evenly in designing a critique of the chosen material within a historical-cultural context to produce both a short paper and a Power Point presentation.

35% - Presentation

Course participants are expected to deliver a presentation, between 15-20 minutes long, offering an interpretation of the week’s materials. Depending on class numbers, presentations may be made in pairs. In which case, both presenters will be expected to make an equal contribution.

Presentation guidelines are available.

25% - Attendance and class participation

Students are permitted by University rules to miss three classes. Any more than this results in an automatic course fail.

Materials

Reading materials will often be available open access on-line. Scanned copies of book chapters and journal articles (where not available in University of Debrecen libraries) will be made available for students’ use following all relevant copy-write regulations.

During the first class the instructor will discuss the possibility of organising optional film screenings, subject to student interest and availability.

Schedule

Week 1

Introduction – presentation allocation & group project information

Optional background reading:

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. London: Lane, 1970.

Week 2

Disillusionment in the Trenches & Rebellion in the Streets

  1. Owen, Wilfred. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen’. Text/html. Poetry Foundation, 22 October 2017.
  2. ———. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen’. Text/html. Poetry Foundation, 22 October 2017.
  3. Pearse, Patrick. ‘Rising Poems: “The Mother” by Patrick Pearse’. Independent.ie. Accessed 23 October 2017.
  4. Yeates, W.B. ‘Rising Poems: “Easter, 1916” by WB Yeats’. Independent.ie. Accessed 23 October 2017.

Weeks 3 & 4

Sunset of Empire

  1. Moyn, Samuel. ‘Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement’. In The Last Utopia : Human Rights in History. London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.
  2. ‘United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514: Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’, 14 December 1960.
  3. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. Repr. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin books, 2001.

Week 5

Violence and the American Civil Rights movement

  1. Malcom X (1992) film
  2. Selma (2015) film
  3. Stockett, Kathryn. The Help. London: Penguin, 2015.

Week 6

Vietnam & changing society in the USA

  1. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) film
  2. Forest Gump (1994) film
  3. F.T.A. (Fuck the Army) (1972) film
  4. Winter Soldier (1972) film

Complementary readings – extracts will be allocated when participant numbers are confirmed:

  1. Steinbeck, John, and Thomas E. Barden. Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
  2. Adler, Bill, ed. Letters from Vietnam. New York, NY: Presidio Press, 2004.

Week 7

The emergence of Human Rights

  1. Cooper, Belinda. ‘Book Review - The Last Utopia - Human Rights in History - By Samuel Moyn’. The New York Times, 24 September 2010, sec. Sunday Book Review.
  2. Moyn, Samuel. ‘The Surprising Origins of Human Dignity’. In Human Rights and the Uses of History. London: Verso, 2014.
  3. Hunt, Lynn. ‘“Torrents of Emotion”: Reading Novels and Imagining Equality’. In Inventing Human Rights : A History. London: Norton, 2007.

Week 8

Consultation week

Week 9

Humanitarian intervention & Responsibility to Protect

  1. Hotel Rwanda (2004) film
  2. Power, Samantha. ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. (preface,& any 2 of chapters 10, 11, or 12)
  3. Evans, Gareth J. The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2008. (chapter 1)
  4. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. ‘The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’. Ottawa, December 2001. (pages 1 -19)
  5. Menon, Rajan. The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. (introduction)

Week 10

Perceptions of violence

  1. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
  2. Four Lions (2010) film

Week 11

Group project presentations

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