BASC50090 - The Unwritable War: Civil War Tales and Poems of Melville, Whitman, Bierce, and Crane

Course Description

Its interior history will not only never be written, its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested . . . I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be. (Whitman, Memoranda During the War, p. 7)

It was the war that could not be written, according to Walt Whitman, and yet he and others wrote it—obsessively, profoundly, with deep conviction and inconsolable sorrow. Whatever else it may be, the Civil War was our forging as a nation—in addition to redefining the nature of war.

            We begin the memoirs and poetry of Walt Whitman, then move to fiction of Ambrose Bierce, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and conclude with the newspaper dispatches of James Henry Gooding of the Massachusetts 54th; in the tutorial, we begin with Whitman’s Drum-Taps, proceed through a selection of Melville’s war poems, and conclude with Faulkner’s “too little appreciated but brilliant novel” (Cleanth Brooks), The Unvanquished.

We will also look briefly at the highly regarded film adaptations of Red Badge—by noted American director, John Huston; “An Occurrence”—by Robert Enrico (made famous by its presentation on Twilight Zone), and justly popular film, Glory, directed by Edward Zwick—“the heart-stopping story of the first black regiment to fight for the North in the Civil War,” chronicled in Gooding’s dispatches.

Course Outline

Course Syllabus

Required texts:

Bierce, Ambrose Bierce's Civil War: Annotated Warbler Classics Edition 
•    978-1734029246

Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Binder/Norton)
•    978-0393319545

Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text (Vintage)  
•    978-0679736523

Gooding and Adams, On the Altar of Freedom:  A Black Soldier's Civil War Letters from the Front (UMass Press)
•    978-0870237454
Melville, Selected Poems of Herman Melville (Penguin Classics)
•    978-0143039037
Whitman, Memoranda During the War (Oxford)
•    978-0195307184
Whitman, Drum Taps (NYRB Poets)
•    978-1590178621

To be posted on Canvas: 
•    Lowell, Robert, “For the Union Dead”
 

Notes

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