About the Cluster
The Institute for the Humanities research cluster Representations of War brings together faculty from departments spread across the Arts and Social Sciences with a view to stimulating research and teaching on the subject of the representation of war. It was established in March 2006 and received funding from the Institute for the Humanities in 2006-07 and 2007-08. In light of recent world events, which have revealed the divergence of perspectives on the political legitimacy, efficacy, and morality of war, the need to understand what wars are and how they work and may be assessed has, has become more urgent than ever.
The phrase "the representation of war" encompasses the great variety of ways war is understood by those working in such academic disciplines as philosophy, languages and literature, film, sociology, strategic studies, and the visual arts.
In addition to academic perspectives, we intend to identify and assess the views on war (and the representation thereof in the popular media, government correspondence, the Internet, and so on) of the general public, of soldiers, and of governments at home and abroad.
Questions thus central to our project include, but are not limited to, the following: What is a "war," and how may it reasonably be distinguished from other forms of aggressive human interaction? Is there a specifiable "aesthetics" of warfare, one which constrains, however minimally, the substance of war's representation or the genre(s) to which these representations are assigned? In what way(s), and to what extent, does our present understanding of war depend for its salience on our interpretations of the past? How do we assess wars' moral costs, and thus settle the troubling matter of their overarching legitimacy? Given the disruptions, dislocations, and contingencies of modern warfare, what may be said of wars' effects on our social identities? If war is, as Clausewitz has said, "merely the continuation of politics by other means," then is the representation of war necessarily political?
The cluster started a book and film collection on Representations of War that is hosted by the English Multimedia Lab in University College.
It is currently working on an anthology book project based on the research workshop "Depiction and Definition: Representing War Across the Disciplines."
The workshop developed in its Final Discussion a list of questions which are relevant for discussing "Representations of War": transcription of discussion questions.
For a transcript of the roundtable "Representations of War across the Disciplines" click on the following link: transcription roundtable.
Members of the Research Cluster
(new members - graduate students and faculty - are always welcome, please contact Dr. Adam Muller)
The contact person for Representations of War research cluster is Dr. Adam Muller of the Department of English, Film & Theatre.
The cluster meets for reading workshops during the academic year. Texts discussed include theoretical and fictional texts on the representation of war, as well as texts / drafts of selected by a cluster member who leads the discussion, toward the presentation of the cluster members' own work in combination with other texts. If you are interested to join the discussion group, please contact Dr. Adam Muller.
Events and Activities in 2007-2008
in 409 Tier on 7 March 2008, 5:00-6:30 p.m.
Roundtable participants
Moderator Elena Baraban (German and Slavic Studies, Manitoba)
Questions that were discussed:
1. Is there a specifiable “aesthetics” of warfare?
2. Is the representation of war necessarily political?
For a transcript of the roundtable "Representations of War across the Disciplines" click on the following link: transcription roundtable.
The roundtable was followed by a reception (Senior Common Room, University College, 6:30-7:30 p.m.)
Financial support is gratefully acknowledged from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as well as from the University of Manitoba’s Vice President of Research, Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, Centre for Defence and Security Studies, Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, and the Departments of Anthropology, Classics, English, German & Slavic Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Studies, and Sociology.
d.) A two-day research workshop on March 8/9, 2008, Hotel Fort Garry
Depiction and Definition: Representing War across the Disciplines
The workshop will feature 16 participants, 10 speakers from the UofM and six invited experts on the representation of War from other North-American universities.
The five sessions of the workshop - Identities, Memory, Ideology, Phenomenology of Atrocity, and Unrepresentability - provide a forum for the examination of the nature of war, the historical, social, and political contexts of conflicts, and the place of art, literature, the media and film in representation of the experience of warfare.
This workshop will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines in order to exchange views on the way in which war and its attendant phenomena are remembered, witnessed, discussed, and understood. The terms "witnessing," "remembrance," "depiction," and "understanding" are here deliberately broadly construed so as to accommodate participants' desire to attend to the great range and variety of their application in disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences, in the stories told by academics, eyewitnesses, and others about the nature of wars and their effects.
We are intending for the workshop presentations, in revised form, to form the nucleus of a critical anthology which we expect to place with a university press in 2009.
Program
All workshop participants are expected to have read the long versions of the 16 workshop papers (15-20 pages) beforehand. The organizers will send an electronic workshop package shortly after the submission deadline on February 11. A hard-copy workshop package can be sent out upon special request. Please contact Dr. Stephan Jaeger for further information, to register for the workshop and to receive the workshop package.
Session 1: National Imaginaries
Session 2: Meta-representation
Session 3: Rewriting of History
Session 4: Ethics and Tactics
Session 5: Politics and Publicity
Michael Stack (Philosophy, University of Manitoba): “The Morality of the Aesthetics of War”
Robert Calder (English, Universiy of Saskatchewan): “Writers at War”
Session 6: Testimonies
The workshop developed in its Final Discussion a list of questions which are relevant for discussing "Representations of War": transcription of discussion questions.
Events & Activities in 2006-2007
2. Public Roundtable "Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the Representation of War"
on Nov. 1, 2006, 4:30-6:30 p.m., 409 Tier; presentations by James Chlup, Michael Stack, and Andrew Woolford, moderator Elena Baraban, respondent Stephan Jaeger
The Representation of War research group organized a symposium that will gave an opportunity to the participants as well as to the UM faculty and students to discuss issues of war representations with two historians of culture, Dr. Serguei Oushakine(Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton) and Dr. Dominick LaCapra (Comparative Literature/Jewish Studies, Cornell). Dr. Oushakine's work in anthropology, political science, and sociology deals with the aftermaths of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan (1979-1989) and the 1990s wars in Chechnya. His book, The Patriotism of Despair: Communities of Loss in Contemporary Russia, is forthcoming at Cornell U Press. Among many books written by Dr. LaCapra, several deal with the problems of representing war in literature and historiography: Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), and Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). |
Symposium Schedule Friday, March 23 10:30-12:00 -- graduate student and junior faculty roundtable (409 Tier) led by Serguei Oushakine and Dominick LaCapra, 13:30-15:15 --Public lecture by Serguei Oushakine(Princeton): "Traumatic Rituals: Writing History With Song", 15:15-15:30 -- coffee break, Common Room, Robson Hall, faculty of Law 15:30-17:15 -- Public lecture by Dominick LaCapra(Cornell): "Trauma, Witnessing, and the Sublime", 17:30-18:30 -- Public Reception, Senior Common Room, University College
Saturday 9:30-11:30 a.m. -- Internal research cluster meetingwith Serguei Oushakine and Dominick LaCapra (Hotel Fort Garry,Salon A) |
We gratefully acknowledge support for the Symposium on March 23/24, 2007 from the The Institute for the Humanities, the Distinguished Visitor Lectureship Committee (President's Office), the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, the Centre for Defense and Security Studies, and the Departments of Classics, English, German and Slavic Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology, at the University of Manitoba.